Agency aims to erase robot-car barriers

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering eliminating regulations that currently block self-driving vehicles designed without steering wheels, brake pedals or other driver controls from hitting the road.

The agency, in a document posted online, said it will soon ask automakers and technology companies to identify “any unnecessary regulatory barriers to automated safety technologies.”

The move is an early signal that President Donald Trump’s administration plans a formal effort to reshape auto safety regulations to accommodate self-driving vehicles. Companies including General Motors Co. and Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC are racing to develop self-driving car technologies that need no human intervention, which could one day lead to vehicles with radically different designs such as loungelike cabin configurations.

That’s currently impossible due to dozens of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. The first standards date back the 1960s, and many act as de facto requirements that automakers design cars, pickups and SUVs for a human driver. One, for example, requires that vehicle brakes be operated by a driver’s foot.

The comments will be used by the agency to determine what changes are necessary to “safely lay a path for innovative automated vehicle designs and technology,” it said in a summary of rule-making posted on the Transportation Department’s website.