Nuro
Until this week, the federal government’s car safety regulations were based on two assumptions that probably seemed obvious at the time of writing: that every car will have people inside, and that one of the people will be the driver. To protect the safety of the driver and potential passengers, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) requires every car to have seat belts and airbags. It also sets minimum standards for everything from windshield strength to crash test performance.
In the coming years, these assumptions will become increasingly outdated. When the Trump administration came to an end, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Thursday released a new version of the FMVSS acknowledging that some cars have no drivers – and that some vehicles have no one inside at all.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of these new rules is Nuro, a company that builds delivery robots designed to work on streets rather than sidewalks. In a statement to Ars, Nuro described the rules as a “significant advance that will help Nuro commercialize our self-driving delivery vehicles.”
A number of FMVSS rules are designed to protect the occupants of a vehicle – for example, rules that require airbags and seat belts. Nuro points out that these requirements are worse than useless for a delivery vehicle without passengers. In an accident, the weight of unnecessary equipment increases the chance of injuries to people outside the vehicle.
Last year, Nuro asked NHTSA for special exemptions from some of these rules – including that Nuro’s robots do not have windscreens. In its new rule, NHTSA has offered this exemption to anyone who builds a vehicle designed for zero passengers. NHTSA waived the requirements for seat belts and airbags, as well as rules on the design of door locks and seats themselves. It also exempts these vehicles from meeting accident standards, as the vehicles will only contain pizza or groceries – not people.
No more ‘driver’s seat’
Even when a vehicle is designed to transport people, it does not necessarily have to have a driver. Some self-driving vehicles will be ‘dual mode’ vehicles, where a driver has the option to take over and drive with conventional control panels. But others may not have a steering wheel or pedals at all. And that would clash with the old rules, which assumed that every car would have a driver in the front seat on the left.
The new rules clear up a lot of terminology. Instead of referring to the driver and passenger side of the car, the new rules refer only to the left and right sides. If the vehicle does not have a driver’s seat, the rules for the front seat (the “passenger seat”) also apply to the front seat.
If a car is both manual and self-driving, it must be able to detect when there is a child in the driver’s seat, and can deactivate the self-driving functions.
The new rules also recognize that the design of vehicle control may change over time. The phrase “steering wheel” was used in many places in the old line. NHTSA has done a seek-and-replace in favor of ‘steering control’, making it clear that a steering wheel does not have to be circular.
At the same time, NHTSA rejected a request from Tesla to draw up rules on alternative methods of controlling a vehicle. In a regulatory filing last year, the electric carmaker predicted that carmakers would “develop new concepts that rely on buttons, joysticks, screens, etc.” In the future, a car may not have one driver. Instead, multiple passengers may have the ability to control a vehicle from different seats. Therefore, Tesla encouraged NHTSA to abandon the concept of a driver’s seat altogether. NHTSA rejected this approach.
“The new definition is intended to include traditional management controls, not future controls that have not yet been developed,” the agency wrote in response. “This rule does not address design of the joystick intended to be the only manual control, or driving controls that do not have a fixed position on a particular seat.”
The car safety group wants NHTSA to do more
NHTSA has taken an important step in streamlining the development of self-driving vehicles. But more important is what the agency has chosen not to do this week: it has not drafted any notable new regulations on testing or deploying self-management technology.
Self-driving vehicles are almost completely unregulated under federal law. As long as a business starts with an FMVSS vehicle, federal law gives it the free rein to convert it into a self-driving car and test it on public roads. NHTSA had almost no formal oversight of these testing efforts.
For example, companies testing self-driving cars in California must submit annual reports to state regulators describing the number of miles they have traveled and the types of accidents that have occurred. Federal regulators did not set such a requirement.
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) also have no federal oversight. Federal law does not set minimum performance standards for these systems, does not provide standardized interfaces for them, and does not require the use of driver monitoring systems to ensure that drivers adequately monitor them while they are active.
The Trump administration’s focus on reviewing outdated regulations rather than forming new regulations has upset some car safety advocates. In an email Thursday, highway safety advocates blew NHTSA’s ‘failure to promote the prudent rules’ outlining the minimum performance standards for autonomous driving systems.
The group called on NHTSA to set up the use of active safety features such as automatic emergency braking and lane departure warnings in new cars. It is clear that the Trump administration no longer has time to work on this issue. But an important question for the incoming Biden team is to continue with the practical approach of Trump’s NHTSA and whether the technology should regulate more aggressively.