USA/1593
WTO/TBT
US United States of America
  • 03 - Services, Company organization, Management and quality, Administration, Transport, Sociology
  • 19 - Testing
  • 43 - Road vehicle engineering
2020-05-29
2020-04-01

Motor vehicle occupant protection; Quality (ICS 03.120), Test conditions and procedures in general (ICS 19.020), Crash protection and restraint systems (ICS 43.040.80)

Occupant Protection for Automated Driving Systems (34 page(s), in English)

Notice of proposed rulemaking - This proposal is one of a series of regulatory actions that NHTSA is considering to address the near- and long-term challenges of testing and verifying compliance with the Federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSS) for vehicles equipped with Automated Driving Systems (ADS) that lack the traditional manual controls necessary for human drivers, but that are otherwise traditional vehicles with typical seating configurations. This document seeks to clarify the ambiguities in applying current crashworthiness standards to ADS-equipped vehicles without traditional manual controls, while maintaining the regulatory text's application to more traditional vehicles and vehicles equipped with ADS that may have alternate modes. This proposal is limited to the crashworthiness standards and provides a unified set of proposed regulatory text applicable to vehicles with and without ADS functionality. This NPRM builds on NHTSA's efforts to identify and address regulatory barriers to vehicles with unique designs that are equipped with ADS technologies, including the advance notice of proposed rulemaking on removing barriers in the crash avoidance (100 Series) FMVSS in May 2019, the request for comments on this topic in January 2018, and the research that NHTSA is currently conducting. NHTSA also intends to issue a separate notice regarding removal of barriers in the FMVSS that pertain to telltales, indicators, alerts, and warnings in ADS-equipped vehicles.