u/techno-phil-osoph

As Waymo deploys more driverless cars to 15 U.S. cities and counting, its vehicles keep encountering new and unexpected situations that they have no script to handle.

Certification, type approval, homologation. Not the sexiest words in autonomous driving, but arguably the most decisive ones for whether AVs ever reach European roads at scale. The EU's Level 4 regulation (2022/1426) has existed for four years.

As of today, not a single vehicle holds EU type approval under it. The common narrative blames slow regulation. My guest tells a different story: the framework is ready, the technical services are ready, and the real bottleneck sits inside the companies themselves.

Dirk Fratzke is Project Leader in the Autonomous Driving & ADAS department at TÜV SÜD, the independent testing organization that assesses AV companies across three continents, from Waymo and Aurora in the US to projects across Europe and Asia. He led TÜV SÜD's involvement in the EVA shuttle project in Karlsruhe, one of Germany's first SAE Level 4 deployments in public transport, and has co-authored academic research on systematically testing autonomous driving functions.

This episode covers:

• What homologation and type approval actually mean, and how Europe's independent assessment model differs from US self-certification
• The two-step approval process for Level 4: EU type approval for the product, then operating area approval from the "owner of the road"
• Why the 1,400-unit small series cap is a benefit for AV companies, not a showstopper
• What is really delaying Europe's first Level 4 approval, and why Dirk says "maybe one year, maybe two"
• Why Mobileye's completed functional safety management assessment matters as a milestone
• Whether end-to-end AI systems can pass European certification at all
• Why http://Pony.ai, WeRide, and Momenta are entering Europe
• How TÜV SÜD approved shuttles without steering wheels by arguing from the regulatory framework for horse-drawn coaches
• The newly adopted UN global regulation for driverless vehicles, and the alcohol interlock absurdity that shows why updates were overdue

Whether you build, operate, insure, or invest in autonomous vehicles, this episode explains the process that decides who gets to deploy in Europe and when.

...and here a video.

The getaway car was parked just outside the Marina yoga studio, idling in the January night air as the burglar made his move. 

In under three minutes, the burglar was in and out of Hot 8 Yoga with an armload of activewear. He stuffed the loot in the car’s trunk, hopped inside and disappeared down the street, comfortably carried away by an autonomous Waymo vehicle.  

The suspect’s escape turned an otherwise unremarkable break-in into a novel case for San Francisco police, who said it was probably the city’s first instance of a criminal fleeing the scene in a self-driving car. 

Nearly six months since the burglary, police have still not made an arrest or publicly identified any suspect, despite the fact that Waymos are outfitted with multiple high-definition cameras and require users to make accounts with their credit card numbers. 

[...]

After the Netherlands and Lithuania, Estonia becomes the third country in the EU, where Tesla FSD Supervised has been approved.