A little history before getting to NHTSA's ANPRM

I want to first thank the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) for requesting public input as it takes initial steps to regulate autonomous vehicle (AV) safety. I appreciate the difficulty inherent in the details of creating, promoting, and, in the future, enforcing regulation to ensure AV safety. Not to mention the fact that no matter how we encourage or regulate to make AV transportation as safe as possible, there is no mode, no vehicle, and no set of circumstances that will guarantee complete safety. No matter how safe - just as with elevators and airplanes - there will be risks. What we're talking about is significantly reducing those risks, not eliminating them.

I'm not an engineer and that lack of knowledge renders me ill equipped to offer useful comments about software, logarithms, sensors or cameras. I know this because, in addition to their specialized knowledge, the brain of an engineer works differently from mine. I have a family full of them and, trust me, they think in more detail and more logically than I do. But as someone with a law degree and years of experience working as a lawyer, I believe that process and regulation matter to ensure that safety is considered, even if we somewhat slow down full scale adoption of new technologies. 

Federal Motor Vehicle Law

The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 (Vehicle Safety Act) - This is the US law that first required the development of federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSS) and it predates the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), though only by about a month. The National Traffic Safety Agency was created within the US Department of Commerce, but, barely a month later, in the legislation establishing the USDOT, a new agency within the nascent USDOT was created to carry out the dictates of the Vehicle Safety Act. This would be the National Traffic Safety Bureau, the precursor to today's National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Nothing in the 1966 Act limits its jurisdiction to the governance of human-driven machines. 

The text of the Act is quite broad, leaving the work of research and setting standards to the brand new National Traffic Safety Agency. The passage of this legislation followed the public outcry over the thousands of deaths attributed to vehicle crashes and the actions of the car companies in elevating profits and style over safety, Congress demanded in the Act that the initial FMVSS be ready in a year and indeed they were drafted within that time frame. Though Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965, catapulted the issue of escalating death and carnage on the nation's roads to a matter of immediate public concern and spurred that initial legislative activity, roadway safety has not remained anywhere near the top of voters' or the public's concerns. In the US alone, we continue to witness 30-40,000 fatalities per year. (By the way, despite giving birth to the auto safety movement that survives today, the book Unsafe at Any Speed was not without criticism from an engineering perspective.) 

In the next post, I will explore the comments that NHTSA has received in response to an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM). Though the comments are public, they do not tend to receive much media coverage. Because this NHTSA ANPRM is important, I will be summarizing the comments one-by-one in this blog.