AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
Stephanie, thank you. Good afternoon, I’m glad to be part of these exciting conversations. AI Strike Team, thank you for organizing this important event – what a great turnout.
This year, 25 years ago, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and as the first person in my family to graduate from college, this city played an outsize role in shaping who I am and is quite special to me. This place has changed since my undergrad days, and in a good way. The redevelopment and reinvestment across the region is incredible. 25 years ago, who would have thought that we’d see automated vehicles commercially deployed on our roads, and that this city has played, and continues to play, a leading role in their safe development. 25 years ago, as a Pitt student studying philosophy and jazz performance, artificial intelligence was my South Oakland roommate cheating on his exams.
I’ve spent the last few days here touring the city and vicinity and meeting with the many AV and AI leaders. I’d like to thank those who took time out of their very busy schedules to meet with me, and the fantastic contingent of my NHTSA teammates who joined me. And I’d like to thank Jackie Erickson from the Allegheny County Conference on Regional Development for putting together an incredible and informative tour.
It’s poetic that the city that enabled Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon to lead the way for American innovation that propelled our nation’s success in the 20th Century sees Carnegie Mellon University enabling the same type of innovation through the 21st century. Not merely through capital investments and some good ideas—but through the hard work, resiliency, and willpower that this region personifies.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has charged the Department of Transportation with ushering in the Golden Age of Transportation, and we stand at a moment in time at which technology provides the opportunity to radically change the way we live, and move people and goods. While this applies across all sectors, as the automotive regulator, I’ll focus on automated vehicles, and this technology is absolutely revolutionary. We are on the precipice of great change, and it’s critical that America continues to be the global leader in AV development and deployment through intentional, robust, and safety-focused engineering and design. We want innovation and investments to happen here in Pittsburgh and all across America.
And this is the moment to make decisions that will enable the United States to remain the leader in AVs well into the 21st century. To do that, as Secretary Duffy likes to say, we cannot afford to move too quickly, but we certainly cannot afford to move too slowly. At NHTSA, we are moving with a sense of deliberative urgency—enabling technological advancement while maintaining rigorous safety oversight while we develop competency standards for automated driving systems.
We’re looking to support innovation because automated driving systems hold incredible potential promise, unlocking mobility options for senior citizens, people with disabilities, and others who are unable to or don’t want to drive for a variety of reasons—because they’ve been drinking or maybe just because they’ve had a bad day and a long flight and they just don’t want to talk to a stranger on their ride home. Importantly, this technology has the potential to enable full participation in our society and economy for the many left behind due to an inability to drive.
Because access to independent transportation is access to freedom.
Additionally, AVs could play a role in addressing the fatality crisis on our roads that I and the rest of our fantastic team at NHTSA spend all of our waking hours fighting. Several risky and unacceptably common driving behaviors, like speeding, or driving distracted, fatigued, drunk or high play a role in tens of thousands of deaths every year.
AVs could potentially eliminate so many of these dangerous behaviors. AVs will never drive impaired, tired or distracted—and they shouldn’t speed through school or work zones. If they do, they should be subject to traffic enforcement. And you don’t need to worry about them having road rage.
But this future is not guaranteed. We’ll only see these benefits and transformations if people choose to adopt the technology, and they’ll only adopt it if they trust it. Safety as the foundation of everything you do will help establish that trust. And as with everything else in life, trust must be earned.
Making safety the bedrock of your decisions, designs, and policies will help nurture this trust.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is encouraging the pursuit of innovation, but only if that pursuit that takes place responsibly and safely.
This is the foundation of our Federal Automated Vehicle Framework.
Our approach is one of balance, combining thoughtful policy decisions that enable innovation with an unapologetic exercise of our oversight and enforcement authorities. We believe this approach will make our vehicles both safer and more innovative than ever. And we are moving quickly on both fronts. I call it deliberate urgency – moving ahead with purpose but at a pace that never puts safety second.
Safety is at the heart of everything we do. We are the cop on the beat and our core mission is the safety of the American people. If we see unreasonable risks, then we’re not going to hesitate to act, and do so loudly. We are in frequent discussions with AV companies, as well as state officials, local governments, and first responders. We’ve opened several investigations into ADS-equipped vehicles and secured multiple recalls, and won’t hesitate to do so when appropriate.
We’ve also recently issued a call to action to AV developers based upon a clear pattern of AVs interfering with law enforcement and other first responders, directing them to develop solutions. We’ve met with key AV developers to discuss their responses to the call, and have seen positive concrete steps—including issuing a recall. We will continue to keep a close eye on these interactions to ensure meaningful changes and solutions.
But it’s not fair or good public policy to play whack-a-mole, shaking our fists at things we don’t like, while staying silent on expectations. This is why we’ve been so active in engaging with our co-regulators in state and local government, the industry, safety experts, and first responders.
All of these groups look to NHTSA and the federal government for national leadership and guidance on AVs. Our current voluntary guidance document, AV 2.0, dates back to 2017 during the first Trump administration, and we can all agree that a lot has changed in that time.
We’re moving ahead with developing new guidance, which we expect will help shape the industry’s approach to safety for years to come. This updated guidance aims to support the industry’s strategic transition from test-centric operations to mid-scale driverless deployments.
We’re focusing on critical safety elements, such as emergency responder interactions, safety management systems, and remote assistance. And while we have ideas and strong opinions on safety assurance, this guidance will be improved by participation from other safety and technical experts, including many in this room.
But a well-crafted regulatory structure requires basic maintenance of our FMVSS to ensure our regulations remain current for the vehicles being developed and deployed today and tomorrow. And so many of our regulations were designed when no one envisioned a vehicle without a human driver, and therefore require or reference manual controls. This means that the technology of the future is often tethered to the regulations of the past. So we are working diligently on much-needed FMVSS updates to account for new designs enabled by automated driving systems, without compromising safety.
Our approach is not to take a hatchet to current standards and give AVs free reign based on an assumption that they’ll be safe. Instead, we’re using a scalpel to make necessary technical updates while still placing safety first. Vehicles designed never to be operated by a human driver should remain subject to critical safety requirements. But by updating the rules to prioritize safety performance requirements over design specifications, we restore common sense to our vehicle regulations.
We aren’t trying to predict the future as we update these standards. We don’t have a crystal ball that tells us how automotive technology will evolve, although I’ve asked for one. But if we revise our FMVSS to focus on performance, not design requirements, we won’t need to be fortune tellers. Our FMVSSs will be nimble enough to ensure that the vehicles of the future continue to deliver the high level of safety we expect.
We’ve proposed amendments to five critical FMVSS that would have no detrimental effect on safety but would enable creative vehicle designs, and we have many more coming. Our fantastic team of engineers and lawyers is working diligently, with deliberative urgency, to deliver these final rules in a thoughtful manner.
All of this work aligns with our AV Framework’s goal of removing unnecessary regulatory barriers to the safe development of AVs, and unleashing the innovation that the United States, and the city of Pittsburgh, delivers better than anywhere in the world.
But guidance, responsive enforcement, and modernizing outdated regulations will not cement public trust. So we’re also considering the natural question that arises as AVs deploy: How do we know if an AV is a safe driver?
In March, I announced plans to commence development of a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard for Automated Driving System performance. Federal law requires that competency requirements will need to be objective, practicable, and meet the need for motor vehicle safety. They must include metrics for each behavioral competency, as well as repeatable methods and means to assess them. We’ve been hard at work since that time, and have been in contact with AV companies, including several based in Pittsburgh, inviting them to come to our Vehicle Research and Test Center in Ohio to participate in this effort. These hands-on discussions will be critical as we move forward.
But doing this on an iterative and experimental basis won’t meet our goals of providing regulatory safety assurance on a timeframe that matches the trajectory of technological development and deployment. So I’m excited to announce that just yesterday, we’ve just executed a cooperative agreement with SAE to launch ASCEND consortium.
This joint government and industry initiative will expedite the development of data-driven AV performance standards. Our top priority for the consortium is ADS competency, which will inform and accelerate a corresponding FMVSS.
Ultimately, our ADS performance rulemaking will provide federal leadership in this space. By delivering an AV competency standard, we hope we’ll be able to address the burgeoning patchwork of inconsistent State and local level requirements, and continue to encourage American innovation and promote the safe development and deployment of these vehicles on our roads.
And throughout the process, we want to hear from you, not only when you have ideas, but when you have problems. Transparency facilitates prioritization of safety, and with it, public trust. I strongly encourage AV developers to adopt the same transparency practices with state and local governments as well.
Our doors are open for mature discussion, information gathering, and technical engagement. We have incredibly knowledgeable employees working in our Enforcement, Rulemaking and Research teams, and I appreciate how hard they’ve worked to advance these administration priorities.
NHTSA will continue to encourage and support a balanced approach in this space. We wholeheartedly support innovation but not at the expense of safety. That balance is the key to developing the public trust necessary for widespread deployment, and to helping our society reap the potential benefits of this so very promising technology.
Thank you.