After railing against self-driving cars on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump plans to establish federal guidelines for autonomous vehicles, according to Bloomberg. Onerous regulations have halted the deployment of these vehicles and made them less safe and cost-effective. Updating standards would allow more Americans to revel in the benefits that boundary-pushing autonomous vehicles offer.
Despite significant investment from manufacturers like Tesla and General Motors (GM), self-driving cars have been stifled by federal rules that require these vehicles have pedals and a steering wheel. While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) permits the deployment of 2,500 self-driving vehicles under granted exemption per year, receiving an exemption is a long and costly process. After waiting more than two years for one, GM was forced to pull the plug on their Cruise model with no steering wheel or pedals.
“There’s a strong case to be made that in the future, you might want to remove all of these human controls for the expressed purpose of building a robotaxi,” says Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine. If robotaxis are safer than humans driving as manufacturers argue, then removing these parts would make the cars safer. “They would also, in theory, make them cheaper,” according to Scribner, which would further make them available to a larger swath of people.
Less burdensome regulations would make it easier for Elon Musk to launch his recently unveiled self-driving taxi called the Cybercab, which he expects will hit the market in large quantities before 2027.
Scribner tells Reason that even though federal guidelines would streamline the self-driving car approval process by creating a uniform standard, they might not be necessary pending results from ongoing investigations by the NHTSA.
NHTSA is currently investigating Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving technology company. After claiming in 2022 that Zoox’s autonomous vehicles (with no pedals or steering wheel) were “self-certified” to federal motor vehicle safety standards, two of Amazon’s vehicles unexpectedly stopped, causing two motorcyclists to crash.
“If [Trump’s] regulators find that Zoox’s self-certification was valid, that means that we may not need to do all sorts of updates to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards,” says Scribner. Companies like Tesla would be able to follow Amazon’s lead and self-certify their cars to meet the same safety standards as cars with steering wheels and pedals even if they don’t have these installed.
With support from the presidential transition team, Scribner is “cautiously optimistic” about what a second Trump administration could mean for self-driving vehicles. Given the industry’s emerging interest, it is time to reduce the regulatory barriers that hold this promising technology back from its full potential.
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