The Trump team modernizes car safety rules for the driverless era

Until this week, the federal government’s auto safety regulations were based on two assumptions that probably seemed obvious when they were written: that every car will have people in it, and that one of those people will be the driver. To protect the safety of the driver and potential passengers, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) requires that every car be equipped with seat belts and air bags. It also sets minimum standards for everything from windshield strength to crash test performance.

In the years to come, these assumptions will be increasingly outdated. So, on Thursday, as the Trump administration draws to a close, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a new version of FMVSS that recognizes that some cars do not have a driver and some vehicles have no one. inside. at all.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of these new rules will be Nuro, a startup that builds delivery robots designed to run on streets rather than sidewalks. In a statement to Ars, Nuro hailed the rules as “a significant step forward that will help Nuro market its autonomous delivery vehicles”.

A number of FMVSS rules are designed to protect occupants of a vehicle – for example, rules requiring airbags and seat belts. Nuro points out that these requirements are worse than unnecessary for a delivery vehicle without passengers. In an accident, the extra weight caused by unnecessary equipment increases the risk of injury to people outside the vehicle.

Last year, Nuro asked NHTSA for special exemptions from some of these rules, including allowing Nuro’s robots not to have windshields. In its new rule, NHTSA offered this exemption to anyone building a vehicle designed for zero passengers. The NHTSA waived the requirements for seat belts and airbags as well as rules for the design of the door locks and the seats themselves. It also exempts these vehicles from meeting crash-resistance standards, as the vehicles will only have pizza or groceries inside – not human beings.

No more “driver’s seat”

Even when a vehicle is designed to transport people, it will not necessarily have a driver. Some autonomous vehicles will be “dual-mode” vehicles, in which a driver has the option of taking over and driving with conventional controls. But others may not have a steering wheel or pedals at all. And that would have been at odds with the old rules, which assumed that every car would have a driver in the front left seating position.

The new rules clean up a lot of terminology. Instead of referring to the “driver’s side” and “passenger side” of the car, the new rules simply refer to the left and right sides. If the vehicle does not have a driver’s seat, the rules for the right front seat (the “passenger seat”) also apply to the left front seat.

If a car has both manual and autonomous driving capabilities, it must be able to detect if there is a child in the driver’s seat and turn off the autonomous driving functions.

The new rules also recognize that the design of vehicle controls may change over time. The term “steering wheel” was used in many places in the old rule. NHTSA has researched and replaced in favor of “steering control,” making it clear that a steering wheel does not need to be circular.

At the same time, the NHTSA rejected a request by Tesla to establish rules on alternative methods of checking a vehicle. In a regulatory filing last year, the electric car maker predicted that automakers could develop “new concepts that rely on buttons, joysticks, screens, etc.” In the future, a car might not have a single driver. Instead, multiple passengers may have the ability to control a vehicle from different seating positions. Tesla therefore urged NHTSA to forgo the concept of the driver’s seat altogether. NHTSA rejected this approach.

“The new definition is meant to encompass traditional driving controls, and not future controls that have not yet been developed,” the agency wrote in response. “These regulations do not apply to joystick-type designs which are intended to be the only manual steering control, or to steering controls which do not have a fixed position at a particular location.”

Auto safety group wants NHTSA to do more

NHTSA has taken an important step in streamlining the development of autonomous vehicles. But what the agency chose is even more important do not To Do This Week: It hasn’t created any significant new regulations on the testing or deployment of autonomous driving technology.

Autonomous vehicles are almost completely unregulated by federal law. As long as a company starts with an FMVSS-compliant vehicle, federal law gives it free rein to transform it into an autonomous car and test it on public roads. NHTSA has had virtually no formal control over these testing efforts.

For example, companies that test self-driving cars in California must submit annual reports to state regulators detailing the number of miles driven and the types of accidents that have occurred. Federal regulators have not imposed such a requirement.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) also do not have real federal control. Federal law does not impose minimum performance standards for these systems, does not mandate standardized interfaces for them, and does not require the use of driver monitoring systems to ensure that drivers are adequately monitoring them. while they are active.

Thus, the Trump administration’s focus on revising outdated regulations rather than creating new ones has aroused the ire of some auto safety advocates. In an email Thursday, road safety advocates blasted “NHTSA’s failure to advance common sense rules detailing minimum performance standards for autonomous driving systems.”

The group called on NHTSA to mandate the adoption of active safety features like automatic emergency braking and lane departure warnings in new cars. Clearly, the Trump administration has run out of time to work on this issue. But an important question for Biden’s new team will be whether to continue Trump’s hands-off NHTSA approach or whether to regulate the technology more aggressively.