Japan enacts bill to allow use of smartphones in self-driving cars

May 29, 2019

Tokyo--The Diet, Japan's parliament, passed into law Tuesday a bill allowing drivers to use their smartphones while their cars are traveling autonomously, if they are able to shift to manual driving immediately during an emergency.

The bill to amend the road traffic law, which includes rules on Level 3 self-driving of vehicles under certain circumstances, passed the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet. The amended law will come into effect by May next year.

In Level 3, automated driving is permitted under conditions having to do with the type of road, the vehicle speed and other matters. A Level 3 situation includes a traffic jam on an expressway. Drivers will need to switch to manual driving if the conditions are not met.

Under the current road traffic law, people are banned from talking on their mobile phones and looking for long periods at screens of car navigation systems, television sets and other devices.

The amended law will allow such actions if drivers are able to change over from automated to manual driving immediately.

While the revised law will allow reading and eating, it will prohibit people from drinking alcohol as there is a possibility that they will have to drive their vehicles manually.

The amended law will also require people to equip their cars with a device that will record the operating situation of cars and save the data, in order to detect a system malfunction at an early stage and identify the cause of an accident.

Police will be able to ask drivers to disclose such information if their cars are found with a defect. Jiji Press