CES | Road Rules: Governing the Global Shift to Autonomy

Thank you for having me. It’s good to be with you.

Some of you may not be familiar with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, so let me give a brief introduction.

We’re part of the U.S. Department of Transportation and our mission is to save lives, prevent injuries, and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes. And it’s an enormous and enormously important mission.

The motor vehicle has been absolutely critical to the success, happiness, and well-being of the vast majority of the American public over the past century and will continue to be critical for the next century. Ready access to a car or truck expands our personal, professional, and recreational horizons well beyond any other transportation technology, and has much to do with the ability to achieve the American Dream through upward economic mobility.

But that mobility comes at a great cost. Every year, this country sees approximately 6 million police reported crashes, millions of serious injuries, and tens of thousands of fatalities. We’re combatting a recent spike in fatalities coming from the pandemic, which saw an increase from the 36,000 traffic fatalities in 2019 to over 43,000 in 2021. We’ve had a few years of gradual decreases, with the decline steepening last year—but still thousands higher than just prior to the pandemic. While the number of traffic fatalities varies year by year, every year we see very similar behavioral causes or contributing factors:

• Approximately 50% of fatalities involve people who choose not to wear a seat belt;
• Approximately one-third of fatalities involve people who choose to use drugs or have an extra drink or two—increasingly both—and pick up the keys to drive while impaired;
• Approximately 30% of fatalities involve people who choose to drive above the speed limit—decreasing reaction times and dramatically increasing crash forces; and
• Far too many fatalities—the data are not very reliable—choose to drive while distracted; they just can’t wait to arrive at their destination before checking that message, sending that email, or posting on social media.

NHTSA is the United States vehicle safety regulator. We address vehicle safety through establishing mandatory standards for vehicles and vehicle equipment (called Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or FMVSS), promoting voluntary adoption of safety technologies and performance through our New Car Assessment Program (Five Stars for Cars), and by overseeing vehicle compliance and performance with vehicle recalls.

This brings me to the focus of today’s discussion: automated driving systems, the combination of hardware and software that drives automated vehicles or AVs. For those who haven’t been focused on this area, automated driving systems are a combination of hardware and software technologies that can execute the entire dynamic driving task—all real-time operational and tactical functions required to operate a vehicle in on-road traffic, from the start of the trip to the destination. This is very different from the technologies you see on the vast majority of vehicles for sale today that have advanced driver assistance systems (regardless of branding), which, by definition, require the human who is responsible for vehicle operations to supervise and intervene when they see things go weird. For today’s discussion, I’m talking about vehicles that would never require human intervention—vehicles you can take a nap in.  

Let’s talk about the promise of automated driving systems. The potential for a complete elimination of so many of the human behaviors that cause crashes. AVs will never drive impaired or distracted—and they shouldn’t speed or violate other traffic laws since the developer should be subject to enforcement.

AVs also offer the potential to provide for an incredible expansion of access to personal mobility—which is so critical for access to the American dream—for those who can’t drive (people without licenses, people with disabilities that don’t allow them to drive, the elderly) or who should not drive. This technology has the potential to enable participation in our society and economy for the many marginalized due to the inability to drive.

But let’s be real: the development of an automated driving system is one of, if not the, most challenging engineering problems humanity has ever attempted. And it’s safety critical. Think of the infinite possible challenges presented by what happens on our roadways, and how the human mind is able to adapt to solve those challenges in real time. Automated driving systems have to be programmed to handle each such challenge, requiring an incredible amount of data for training, sensor inputs for operations, and an enormous amount of computing power to process it all.

So, as developers test their platforms and software on public roads, we see odd and annoying behaviors such as vehicles stopping in lane for long periods of time. We sometimes see unsafe behaviors requiring NHTSA to utilize its enforcement authority—we've launched a number of defect investigations into AV developers and have pushed and overseen several recalls. We’re not going to be shy when we see something that we believe presents a risk to the public. But the promise of this technology to society is far too great to ignore, or worse, discourage or prohibit.  

So where do AVs stand under the U.S. regulatory regime? Under current regulation, we don’t have standards for automated driving system competency—meaning that vehicles meeting all applicable FMVSS can be deployed on public roads. But that doesn’t mean AVs are unregulated—quite the contrary, NHTSA’s broad defect authority requires the recall of vehicle technologies—including automated driving systems—posing an unreasonable risk to safety.  So we monitor performance through reports of crashes or other unsafe behaviors. And while an AV that meets all applicable FMVSS can operate on public roads, automated driving systems present design opportunities that were not anticipated when these standards were developed decades ago, and seldom updated since, given the challenges of the regulatory process.

Decades ago, of course, nobody foresaw the advent of vehicles that would not require human operators, so technical performance requirements were drafted around the assumption of a human driver—think braking performance requirements that require manual foot controls and tests for performance when a certain amount of force is applied to the brake pedal. So the technologies of the future find themselves subject to regulations of the past, which still apply, unless granted an exemption. And while NHTSA does have limited authorities to grant exemptions for new technologies, reliance upon the largess of a regulator does not make for a great business model. But this is an administration that is looking to enable innovation while performing robust safety oversight—which is the way the Vehicle Safety Act is designed to operate.

During President Trump’s first term, we were quite active in the AV space. We issued three sets of guidance documents, first from NHTSA’s perspective, primarily directed to AV developers, highlighting critical safety areas of focus for industry and providing a pathway to educate the public on how individual companies are addressing each area. The document also provided NHTSA’s perspective on the appropriate roles of state and local government in overseeing AV safety. The next, from the perspective of each individual DOT modal administration, discussed policy issues not only related to automated motor vehicles, but drones, and automated vessels as well. Lastly, the administration issued a whole of government guidance document.

On the regulatory front, we launched the process of identifying and addressing barriers to designs enabled by automated driving systems. This started in earnest in 2018, when we kicked off research in collaboration with industry and vehicle safety experts to not only identify the ways FMVSS may inhibit novel designs, but also to provide options to translate the requirements to apply to new designs in a way that does not adversely affect safety. Just last month, NHTSA released the fourth and final volume of that effort, which addressed 81 standards and their test procedures.

But we didn’t wait for the research to be completed before acting. We issued a proposal to address known regulatory barriers in the occupant protection space with a large rulemaking that was finalized in 2022. This specifically addressed vehicles with forward facing cabin configurations but no manual controls. We had already identified the safety need for forward collision in the passenger seat, and provided that the same requirements would apply to what we commonly think of as the driver seat. We also clarified that the occupant protection standards do not apply to vehicles designed never to transport a human, such as automated delivery vehicles.

Importantly, we also used our convening authority to bring together states and local governments to share what we’re all doing and allow them to share their own best practices. While the previous administration wasn’t as active in the AV space, focusing on enforcement against AV developers and safety research, I think you’ve already seen this administration return to AV policy in a major way.

Now, we have been directed by President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to develop and implement a new federal AV framework to provide a pathway to the development and deployment of innovative technologies in a way that provides rigorous safety oversight. We fundamentally reject the notion that these are mutually exclusive objectives. The new framework will unleash American ingenuity, maintain key safety standards, and move us closer to a single national standard that spurs innovation and prioritizes safety based on three core principles:

• First, prioritize the safety of AV operations on public roads.
• Second, unleash innovation by removing unnecessary regulatory barriers to the safe development and deployment of the technology.
• Third, enable the commercial deployment of AVs to enhance safety and mobility for the American public. To be clear, this includes the commercial deployment of purpose-built AVs without traditional controls such as steering wheels or brake pedals.

What have we done so far?

We streamlined our reporting process for AV crashes to collect essential information while making compliance simpler.

We announced an expanded and simplified exemption program for the research and development of AVs and importantly put U.S. developers of this technology on a level playing field with foreign competitors—previously this authority only allowed imported vehicles access to public roads!

We streamlined our exemption program for AV deployments that will facilitate faster determinations of applications.

We hosted an in-person workshop at DOT Headquarters where we facilitated a collaborative discussion with industry of many pressing AV policy issues.

I’ve already mentioned our publication of the final volume of technical translations of FMVSS for vehicles with non-traditional designs enabled by automated driving systems. This work is informing our regulatory efforts to remove barriers to innovation while maintaining or enhancing safety requirements.

So, what’s next? Now, I can’t get ahead of myself on specifics, but I think it’s safe to say that 2026 is going to be a big year for AV policy on the federal level.

We’ve already announced first steps to modernize FMVSS with several proposals to modernize standards related to windshields, gear shifters, and lighting to accommodate AVs. And there’s much, much more to follow.

We’re going to continue and accelerate our approach to amending existing FMVSS to remove barriers to new technologies. Rulemaking takes time, but we’re moving with a major sense of urgency.
We’ll also be rolling out guidance for our exemption program that allows for commercial deployment of AVs, which will fill out the program changes announced last year.

We’re exploring updates to NHTSA’s guidance documents to help the AV industry, state and local governments, safety and mobility advocates, and the public continue progress towards the safe deployment of automated vehicles. These updates would get into key developments in the technology since the agency last published guidance for industry during the first Trump administration. Think safety cases, and safety management systems, which can have an enormous benefit to safety, and the manner in which developers use remote assistance when faced with unexpected or challenging circumstances.

We’re also considering using our convening authority to once again facilitate discussions with state and local governments, discussing each other's activities, lessons learned, and best practices.

Beyond AVs, at NHTSA we’re looking at ways our regulations may lead to artificial distortions to the vehicle design process. In our recent proposal to amend our fuel economy standards, for instance, we’re proposing to adjust the criteria for vehicle classification, which we found artificially incentivizes automakers to add design elements to achieve a favorable classification. There’s a reason why so many small crossovers look so similar. 

This is true in the safety regulatory space as well, where regulatory minutiae wholly unrelated to a standard’s safety goals force design decisions that limit innovative ways to meet performance requirements more efficiently, or worse, that block pathways to greater safety.  

We want to liberate the auto sector to build a new generation of safer vehicles based on creative designs and novel approaches that better meet consumers’ preferences rather than complying with a never-ending list of check-the-box requirements.

We believe this unshackling will result in the safest, smartest, most innovative new vehicles in history, at a crucial time in history when our nation is in a tight race to maintain its technological edge.

And we believe automated vehicles can play a big part in improving safety, efficiency, and accessibility on our nation’s roads.

We expect big things in 2026 and beyond. Thank you.