If the head of the nation’s auto safety oversight has his way, self-driving cars won’t need brake pedals or steering wheels in the near future.
In an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday, Jonathan Morrison, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said he supports innovation in autonomous vehicles, including doing away with some features that are currently mandatory.
“If you’re developing a vehicle that is designed never to be driven by a human operator, does it make any sense to require manual control for the vehicle?” Morrison said. “I think the answer is pretty clear there.”
Some self-driving cars, such as models intended for ridesharing fleets from companies like Uber and Tesla, are already steering in that direction, since they aren’t designed for human driving. Some, such as the cars used by Waymocan be taken over by remote human drivers.
Removing brake pedals and steering wheels, however, would mean that a human could not take over if an autonomous car stalls or a dangerous situation arises that requires intervention.
Makers of autonomous vehicles have been urging action on changing requirements for driverless cars since at least 2019. In 2022, NHTSA revised rules for some types of self-driving vehicles on how they must be designed. Morrison’s comments and recent action on requirements for brake pedals suggest it’s now happening.
Morrison said NHTSA is responsible for policing the industry, but doesn’t want to stand in the way of progress.
“The promise that these technologies offer, it’s really undeniable,” he said. “We want to see it succeed, we want to see it develop. That said, it needs to be done right.”
The cars, they are a-changin’
Adding to the complexity of what NHTSA is dealing with as it decides what rules apply to driverless cars and how soon those changes should come is the different levels of auto autonomy (PDF). A Level 1 car might include cruise control or lane assist features, while a Level 4 would be something like a Waymo that is fully autonomous, but still must operate within a designated area or within a defined set of conditions.
Beyond Level 2 or 3, where limited self-driving is offered but still requires human intervention, the car designs we’ve become accustomed to are really no longer necessary, said Spencer Penn, CEO of the AI procurement company LightSource and a former Tesla engineer and Waymo product manager.
“A steering wheel as a human backstop only makes sense in the middle of that ladder, where you’re not confident the car can finish the job on its own,” Penn said. “It’s a holdover from the human-in-the-loop world, not something the autonomy actually leans on.”
The problem, Penn said, is that rules of the road for human drivers are decades old and never accounted for this kind of technology. As Waymo taxis roam the streets and companies including Tesla and Zoox design cars without human trappings, “the technology finally produced something the rules never imagined, a car with no driver’s seat, and the government is updating those standards one at a time to catch up,” he said.
NHTSA relaxing rules on vehicle designs even as it’s investigating stalled self-driving cars in construction zones or cars that have gotten in the way of EMS is a valid concern, he said
“Remove the wheel, fine, but tell me what replaces it,” Penn said. “Passengers need a clear way to stop and get out. First responders need the car to behave predictably. Regulators need real performance numbers, not company slides. Do those in parallel, and I’m for it. Do them out of order, and it’s pulling the parachute before you’ve proven the plane flies.”
Other NHTSA concerns with driverless cars
In the CNBC interview, Morrison also discussed a letter sent to autonomous car makers about incidents in which those vehicles have stalled or been slow to move out of the way of emergency responders.
Morrison said that those incidents are rare, “but every single one of these circumstances goes too far.”
He also answered questions about whether his agency has concerns about the prevalence of Chinese lidar sensor technology, which is used by almost 90% of autonomous vehicles globally. CNBC recently investigated the risks of this type of tech, largely manufactured in China.
Morrison didn’t specifically mention any action NHTSA is taking on that, but said, “That is an area of concern, I think, across the government.”