A senior executive at Toyota Motor Corp in the USA has urged the federal government to prevent individual states setting their own autonomous-vehicle rules — something car manufacturers believe could burden the emerging industry with a mass of contradictory regulations.

Speaking to a House of Representatives sub-committee in Washington on 13 February, Gill Pratt (pictured) — CEO of the Toyota Research Institute — said: “A clear and unequivocal prohibition on states regulating vehicle performance of autonomous-vehicle technology would help to halt or prevent the emergence of a patchwork of state laws.”

Meanwhile, Anders Kärrberg, Volvo’s vice-president of government affairs, wrote to the committee saying that 48 autonomous-vehicle bills have been introduced in 20 states in the last two months alone.

He said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should add an “explicit request” to its autonomous-vehicle policy published last September for states to refrain from making up their own self-driving laws or rules.

Mike Abelson, GM’s vice-president of global strategy, also called for “changes to federal auto safety standards, which currently assume that a human driver will be behind the wheel.

“Without changes to those regulations, it may be years before the promise of today’s technology can be realised, so thousands of preventable deaths that could have been avoided will happen.”