NTSB assails lack of autonomous vehicle regs

The National Transportation Safety Board in a new report condemned the lack of state and federal regulation for testing autonomous vehicles before finding that a distracted human safety driver was the main cause of a fatal 2018 Arizona crash involving an Uber vehicle.

The board criticized the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the government’s road safety agency, for failing to take a leadership role in regulating tests on public roads. But it also said states need to adopt regulations of their own.

“In my opinion they’ve put technology advancement here before saving lives,” NTSB member Jennifer Homendy said of NHTSA, after NTSB staff members called self-regulation inadequate.

NHTSA has issued voluntary guidelines including safety assessment reports from autonomous vehicle companies, but only 16 have filed such reports, the NTSB said. Yet there are 62 companies with permits to do testing in California. The agency has instead avoided regulations in favor of allowing the technology to move forward because it has tremendous life-saving potential.

NTSB staffers told the board that NHTSA has no mechanism to evaluate the companies’ safety reports, and since they aren’t mandatory, few are submitting them.

At a meeting Tuesday the board recommended that NHTSA require companies to turn in the reports and set up a process for evaluating them. NHTSA should make sure the companies have proper safeguards in place. Those include making sure that companies show that they are monitoring vehicle operators to ensure they are paying attention during the tests, the NTSB said.

In a statement, NHTSA said it welcomes the NTSB report “and will carefully review it and accompanying recommendations.”