In Case Of Emergency

With many autonomous vehicles not requiring human safety drivers, there becomes an issue of what happens when a police officer needs to pull over a self-driving car? Currently, Waymo has a solution for this that involves detecting the siren and police lights and pulling itself over. Once it does this, the door can unlock and the windows can roll down so that the police officer can get in contact with Waymo employees in support centers. It is critical that self driving cars have the ability to pull over so that police officers and emergency services can intervene in dangerous situations, however it leaves a question of how much outside forces should be able to control the functions of a car.

Currently, U.S. transportation regulators are debating whether police officers should have the ability to disable self driving cars remotely in case of emergencies. This ability could be useful in certain emergency situations, however, if the technology ended up in the wrong hands, it could allow for terrorists or hackers to orchestrate large-scale attacks using self-driving cars. If there existed a way to remotely shut down a car mid-ride, it would only be a matter of time before others found a way to use this tool. In order to ensure a more secure system, one should try to limit the amount of interactions the outside world can have on a self-driving car, and allowing for outside interference on this scale would present a massive vulnerability.