Like much else in Washington, regulatory action on self-driving cars has ground to an apparent halt because of President Trump's directive to federal agencies to both review actions taken in the last days of the Obama administration and to cancel two regulations for each new one that an agency approves.
That directly affected the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which on Jan. 19 issued guidance on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) policy, which was seen as a complement to the autonomous vehicle (AV) policy guidance the NHTSA issued in the fall of 2016.
The V2I guidance was pulled off the NHTSA website two days later, in deference to Trump's dictate, a NHTSA press spokesman explained. It is not clear how the Trump edicts affect the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) proposed rule the Obama administration issued in December.
Some, such as Paul Brubaker, president and CEO of the Alliance for Transportation Innovation, think the Trump administration can't do worse than the Obama administration. He gives the Executive Office of the President during Obama's term a D-minus.
Obama announced in January 2016 a $4 billion infusion into AV development over the next 10 years. The White House never pushed for that proposal and Congress never considered it.
"They had a duty to make life-saving autonomous vehicles a national priority but didn’t engage on the issue until the last year of the second term," Brubaker said. He credits the leadership of Mark Rosekind, the last NHTSA administrator, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx for leading creation of the first federal AV policy and adds that they did the best they could under difficult circumstances. But both joined the Obama administration very late in the game.
Brubaker, who was one of the members of the Commission on the Future of Autonomous Vehicle Testing and Safety, which released a report in January, is encouraged by early signs from the Trump administration.
"At Secretary Chao’s confirmation hearings, the whole area of automation and leveraging innovation was the second most talked about topic, after infrastructure," he says. He also likes the Trump administration's indications that it believes in a regulatory environment that is restrained and outcome-focused, representing a major departure from the existing regulatory construct.
Specifically, Brubaker wants the Trump NHTSA to exempt AVs from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and to allow sale of AVs that manufacturers have attested have met certain criteria, undergone simulation, and have done some degree of testing, though not billions of miles, which some seem to favor.
"The NHTSA should assume certain features such as brakes, steering wheels and accelerators are not on true level 4 or 5 autonomous vehicles," he explains. He also wants to see a federal pre-emption of state AV safety regulations that he argues are already creating an unworkable patchwork of unique state requirements.
Rulemaking in the early months of the Trump administration will be scarce. But guidance is not regulation, so NHTSA may re-release the withdrawn V2I guidance, which was unobjectionable, sooner rather than later.
Steven H. Bayless, vice president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, says the guidance is not detailed, so it is up to state and local highway departments to fill in the gaps. The bigger problem is that the highway agencies "don't have lots of money to throw around, " adds Bayless.
The lack of funding explains why very few state and local governments have stuck their toes in the V2I water. Here is where some of that $4 billion could have been useful. Bayless points out that the auto industry has been privately funding V2V research and development for years. Highway departments have done no such thing.
“Manufacturers are already spending millions playing whack-a-mole as these unique laws and regulations evolve," explains Brubaker. "Not only is it a waste of money but it is creating delays that can be measured in lives lost."
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