USA: Update of FMVSS to ensure safety of occupants in automated vehicles
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a final rule to ensure safety of occupants in automated vehicles. This rule updates the occupant protection Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (e.g. FMVSS 208, 205, 212, 219) to account for vehicles that do not have the traditional manual controls associated with a human driver because they are equipped with automated driving systems.
The final rule clarifies that, despite their innovative designs, vehicles with ADS technology must continue to provide the same high levels of occupant protection as current passenger vehicles.
This rule is part of NHTSA’s ongoing efforts to ensure the public’s safety as vehicle automation evolves. NHTSA is actively engaged in monitoring and overseeing the safe testing and deployment of these vehicles. NHTSA’s approach to advanced vehicle technologies prioritizes safety across multiple areas, including data collection and analysis, research, human factors, rulemaking and enforcement.
The occupant protection standards are currently written for traditionally designed vehicles and use terms such as “driver’s seat” and “steering wheel,” that are not meaningful to vehicle designs that, for example, lack a steering wheel or other driver controls. This final rule updates the standards in a manner that clarifies existing terminology while avoiding unnecessary terminology, and, in doing so, resolves ambiguities in applying the standards to ADS-equipped vehicles without traditional manual controls. In addition, this final rule amends the standards in a manner that maintains the existing regulatory text whenever possible, to make clear that this rule maintains the level of crash protection currently provided occupants in more traditionally designed vehicles. This final rule is limited to the crashworthiness standards to provide a unified set of regulatory text applicable to vehicles with and without ADS functionality.
The text of the rule is available here.