Pete Buttigieg is racing to keep up with self-driving cars
Some of the things we care about are: helping people get to where they need to be, making sure that people live in a way that is prosperous on equitable terms, dealing with the climate crisis, and supporting good-paying American jobs. These are things we care about in general, so it follows that these should be some of the priorities that guide our choices when we’re getting involved in the innovation space.
Lastly — but importantly — we’re prioritizing being ready to adapt, to be flexible, and to evolve. Again, not something that is second nature, especially for a regulatory agency. Regulation is a big part of what the DOT [Department of Transportation] does, but we obviously need to be adaptable because the technologies are literally changing faster than we can rewrite some of our own plans and rules around them.
When you want a company to do something that’s not in their shareholder interest, there’s got to be more to the picture than pressure. That’s why this is about using billions of dollars to achieve that outcome, but we’re not going to just use those dollars to incentivize something that would’ve happened anyway, to pad profitabilities that would exist regardless. So, yes, it’s about smoothing that picture.
Three things are really going to drive adoption. One is the charging support that we just talked about. The second is the incentives that we’re committing to try to deliver, hopefully through the Build Back Better framework, but whatever the vehicle, it’s an important public policy. Third is the developments that will happen anyway in the market.
I often say that you should be able to have options to get to where you’re going without having to drag two tons of metal with you in order to get there. This bipartisan infrastructure law is history’s largest ever federal investment in public transit, to create those kinds of options for people, and to get out of this idea that transit is something you’re stuck with if you don’t have a car.
The innovation agenda is the bleeding edge of what we’re doing as an agency, but the core of the DOT is safety. When I talk about how technology and innovation should serve our public policy priorities, a good example of that is our core mission around safety. That mission isn’t just about being excited about new things emerging that could be beneficial, but also a fundamental responsibility on the regulatory side. You are going to continue to see us take steps.
Potentially. These are exactly the kinds of things we need to really move more quickly as a government to deal with. We can’t let technology keep running out ahead of our policy or else one of two things will happen: either it emerges and it’s not safe, or it’s ready to emerge and is held back because we haven’t gotten around to finding ways to ensure that it’s safe. Both of those outcomes are bad, but also, we need to think at a deeper level than we have been.
If a model of a tire explodes when it’s not supposed to, that obviously triggers a recall due to a physical flaw. If there is a flaw in a piece of software that could have comparable consequences, we need to have a way to get ahead of it.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about trust in government: it seems to be at a low at this point in the country. There’s a feeling that the government’s not really working for people. Some of that distrust stems from the jobs that some government officials take after they leave public service; for example, a lot of folks who worked at the DOT under President Obama went on to join tech companies after they left the agency.
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