The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been updating rules pertaining to companies fielding autonomous vehicles that lack traditional controls (e.g. steering wheels and pedals). Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a letter informing companies that it would be processing exemptions more quickly so that they can put more driverless cars on public roads.
Since vehicles that lack traditional controls or a human driver fail to adhere to Federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSS), it can take a while to process them. This can sometimes take years, according to the NHTSA. Regulators claim that they’d like to reduce this to a matter of months and have made changes to accommodate that desire.
The NHTSA has streamlined “Part 555” of the exemption process, which permits manufacturers to sell up to 2,500 motor vehicles a year that fall outside the confines of the FMVSS. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the changes on Friday, June 13th.
“The Part 555 exemption process has been rightly criticized for taking years — bogging developers down in unnecessary red tape that makes it impossible to keep pace with the latest technologies,” stated Duffy. “We’ve streamlined this process to remove another barrier to transportation innovation in the United States, ensure American AV companies can out-compete international rivals, and maintain safety.”
“This next step in NHTSA’s AV Framework will advance innovation by supporting the commercial deployment of purpose-built automated vehicles that can satisfy safety requirements,” NHTSA Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser added. “The agency continues working to modernize the FMVSS for automated vehicles, and in the meantime Part 555 exemptions will play an integral role in enabling the ongoing advancement of our domestic AV industry.”
The U.S. government has been keen on normalizing autonomous vehicles for roughly a decade, after having been convinced by industry lobbyists and safety regulators to adopt “Vision Zero” policies. These claim that on-road fatalities can eventually be reduced to zero by lowering speed limits, embracing rules that reduce the number of passenger vehicles, move the public toward self-driving automobiles and increase the usage of automated traffic enforcement and surveillance. Designing pedestrian-focused “15-minute” cities is also supposed to be part of the equation.
Manufacturers are claiming that the current rules have stifled innovation and slowed development of autonomous vehicles. The DOT and NHTSA have said they are absolutely willing to accommodate the industry. But they likewise promised to improve transparency by issuing stricter requirements for companies to issue crash reports within five days of a major incident.
Considering how aggressively the government regulates emissions and safety equipment — providing the industry with the perfect excuse as to why it has been prioritizing smaller engines and jacking up prices — regulators have been comparatively lax in terms of allowing automakers to test so-called autonomous vehicles on public roads.
Your author would likewise argue that currently regulatory trends haven’t resulted in safer vehicles. Crash fatalities have gone up as more tech inclusions became standard equipment. They simultaneously don’t appear to be producing more reliable vehicles. So it’s not exactly clear why we should trust the same entities’ assurances about how “self-driving” vehicles are the pathway toward a crash-free society.
Meanwhile, the people living in cities that are allowing widespread testing of autonomous vehicles have frequently come out against them. Residents have petitioned local leadership to ban them and have even taken matters into their own hands by disabling the vehicles by using traffic cones.
Californians have been particularly hard on AVs, with residents protesting decisions to allow them to run on public roads after several high-profile incidents. Sometimes those incidents were crashes. But there have also been situations where autonomous vehicles simply acted erratically — clogging up traffic and blocking emergency vehicles.
This has resulted in some fire departments and emergency medical services (EMS) condemning autonomous vehicles as troublesome. California is now in a position where city leadership is frequently butting heads with the state over public testing.
Vandalism of the vehicles has not been uncommon in San Francisco and Los Angeles recently saw a slew of Waymo test mules being burned in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids (pictured below). The rationale behind the above is that many view the vehicles, which are equipped with sensor arrays and cameras, as facilitating a surveillance state and government tyranny. In actuality, there have been numerous incidents where companies handed over data to law enforcement (sans warrant). But data sharing hasn’t been exclusive to autonomous vehicles, as many modern passenger vehicles now play host to similar sensor arrays and camera equipment.
The bottom line is that they appear that AVs are far more popular with the people building them than those that are required to share space with them. While the government may be taking this into account, it doesn’t appear to have affected its decision to allow more of them on public roads.
[Images: Sua Sponte Photography/Shutterstock]
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