United States may move to federal legislation for Autonomous Vehicles and we should too – Step-by-Step

News out of the US this morning from Bloomberg suggests that the President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team intend to add a new priority for the Department of Transportation. This new priority focuses on the creation of a national framework for approving autonomous vehicles.

Today, the US Department of Transport’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is responsible for establishing and enforcing safety standards for motor vehicles, including autonomous vehicles, ensuring that vehicles are safe for public roads.

At a state level, states like California, Nevada, and Michigan have regulations controlling testing, deployment, and operation of autonomous vehicles on public roads. These regulations often include requirements for permits, insurance, and safety standards.

Laws differ significantly from state to state, adding significant complexity to the already difficult task of delivering the technology to power AVs. While America is vast, millions of cars cross state lines every single day, so having state-by-state legislation makes no sense for vehicle regulation.

If the US does shift to National laws to support the deployment of autonomous vehicles, this will assist companies like Tesla, Waymo, Cruise. Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, Motional and others to accelerate driverless services.

It is interesting to note that the USDOT’s Automated Vehicles Compressive Plan, released in January 2021, lists the following as it’s second objective:

2. ‘Modernize the Regulatory Environment – USDOT will modernize regulations to remove unintended and unnecessary barriers to innovative vehicle designs, features, and operational models, and will develop safety focused frameworks and tools to assess the safe performance of ADS technologies.

It seems in the 3 years since the document was released, they’ve been unable to achieve this. It’s not clear that this new priority for AV approvals came directly from the establishment of the new Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, although it certainly aligns with it’s objectives. We expect the formal actions will need to wait until Trump is officially in office, scheduled to take place on January 20, 2025, Inauguration Day.

There was also a document titled ‘Ensuring American Leadership in Automated Vehicle Technologies‘ released in January 2020, which also appears to have failed in it’s objectives.

Autonomous Vehicles represent a great opportunity to lower the cost of transportation, helping accelerate an economy. In the late stages of 2024, we see a number of companies scaling their services to multiple states and cities. While there are technical challenges to scaling (i.e. maintaining HD Maps), having to repeatedly jump through regulation x50 states is certainly a massive barrier to achieving those benefits.

Tesla is likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of a potential US-wide regulation for AVs, as their approach is to enable Level 4, Full-Self Driving (unsupervised) to all who subscribe or buy the software upgrade, once the software is ready.

While we are waiting to get our first view of progress made in FSD Version 13, Tesla impressed in October at their Robotaxi event, giving a taste of fully autonomous rides in their upcoming robotaxi model, and Model Ys.

While sticking to timelines isn’t Musk’s biggest strength, the current plan is for FSD Unsupervised (meaning you are not responsible for the vehicle operation), is scheduled for 2025. If Tesla can achieve this software update and can leverage a federal approval process, it’ll dramatically speed up the deployment of robotaxis and autonomous vehicles.

Internationally, countries like Australia may not face the same scale of challenge, having 5 states and 2 territories, however the opportunity to streamline and have a national approval process is equally present. We should follow this lead and prepare legislation to mirror what we have with Australian Design Rules, the regulations that govern the safety of vehicles, along with ANCAP safety ratings which are also set at the National level.