U.S. regulators are studying whether to require federal approval of self-driving car technology before it can be sold to the public, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Tuesday. “I’ve been encouraging our team to think about … the extent to which we should encourage pre-market-approval steps. That would require industry and the department to be more in sync and more rigorous on the front end of development and testing,” he said at an industry conference in San Francisco.
Foxx’s comments, reported by the Wall Street Journal, follow the launch of an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into a fatal crash involving Tesla’s self-driving car software, Autopilot.