Feds clear the way for robotaxis without steering wheels and pedals

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday proposed a new national framework that could make it easier for companies to deploy at scale autonomous vehicles without traditional manual driving controls – like steering wheels, pedals, and sideview mirrors. 

The guidelines also require AV companies to share a whole lot more safety data with the agency.

The AV industry has been anticipating NHTSA’s proposal since last year, when the agency first proposed the ADS-Equipped Vehicle Safety, Transparency and Evaluation Program, known as AV STEP. The program’s goal, among other things, was to allow NHTSA to greenlight the sale and commercialization of autonomous vehicles that are not compliant with federal safety standards due to a lack of manual controls. 

Today, autonomous vehicles that have all their manual parts are allowed to operate on public roads without oversight from NHTSA. But any AVs that can’t be taken over by a human driver have to get an exemption from the agency.

Unless, of course, they’re Zoox. The Amazon-owned company has maintained that it doesn’t need an exemption from NHTSA because it has “self-certified” the safety of its vehicles – a claim that the agency is actively investigating.

Zoox, which recently started rolling out its toaster-like vehicles in San Francisco, isn’t the only AV company looking to lose the steering wheel and pedals. Cruise, before it went under, planned to deploy the Origin, its purpose-built robotaxi, at scale. Electric and autonomous trucking company Einride intends to commercialize an AV freight pod that doesn’t even have a cab for a driver, let alone pedals. And Tesla unveiled its two-door robotaxi prototype in October, which it plans to start production on in 2025 or 2026, according to CEO Elon Musk. 

NHTSA’s proposed program is a voluntary one that would give participants “an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to transparency for their vehicles and operations” by providing regular reporting on safety. 

The AV STEP program has two tiers – one for vehicles built with human controls, with fallback designs that can be managed by humans; and another for vehicles built without such controls. As more of the latter begin to flood public streets, NHTSA hopes the program and data reporting would make the agency better equipped to “address emerging risks associated with their deployment.”

To qualify for the program, companies will need to submit data related to the safety of the “design, development, and operations” of their AVs. Once admitted, participants will be required to submit both periodic and event-triggered reports, like crash reports, to NHTSA – all of which the agency would be at liberty to publish in the name of transparency. 

NHTSA’s call for more data comes as President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has signaled a desire to quash a Biden-era requirement for car-crash reporting that Musk and Tesla oppose. Tesla has the largest market share of vehicles with automated driving features in the U.S., and as such, the majority of the total reported crashes come from Teslas. Tesla has been targeted in several NHTSA investigations, some of which stemmed from the roughly 1,500 crashes the automaker reported to federal safety regulators. 

It’s too soon to tell whether crash reporting for AVs will be eliminated under Trump’s regime, but NHTSA says it wants to collect such data so it can keep up with the fast-moving industry in anticipation of one day establishing minimum standards for AV performance. 

Some industry advocates say the proposed framework is premature. Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, pointed out that the proposal was released shortly after NHTSA issued a set of studies touting the effect of federal safety standards in saving over 860,000 lives from 1968 to 2019. 

“Expanding the deployment of ADS – and without the safety protections provided by FMVSSs – at this time seems premature and lacks independent research and data to support the action,” Chase said in a statement.