Julia Picard

Last December, during a power outage in San Francisco, an observer filmed lines of Waymo robotaxis stopped in their tracks and posted it to social media.

Traffic lights, which guide the self-driving cars, had gone dark.

Not knowing what else to do, the cars just bricked.

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been picking up passengers on the streets of San Francisco since 2022.

Jeffrey Tumlin led San Francisco's transportation agency.

He says the rollout was chaos.

Tomlin says before AVs scale further, they need to prove they can safely handle real-world complexity.

And lawmakers in Washington agree.

Multiple bills are being debated in Congress.

Here's Senator Ted Cruz in early February.

Federal regulation for vehicle design, construction, and performance already exist.

They just haven't been updated for AVs.

Matthew Wood is the vice president of autonomy, integrity, and validation at the AV company May Mobility.

He says engineers already use safety cases, but federal regulation would make them consistent, mandatory, and enforceable.

That means defining how a vehicle minimizes risk when something unexpected happens, from a sensor failure to a power outage or a protest in the street.

But even with federal safety requirements, city streets are still absorbing the steep learning curve of self-driving cars.

As AV companies strive to prove they're safe, it's worth mentioning human drivers kill over 40,000 people a year in the U.S.

Whether federal regulation can reduce that toll without creating new risks is the question.

I'm Julia Picard for Marketplace.