With today’s announcement, the US Department of Transportation is enthusiastically embracing automated driving — It’s saying that self-driving vehicles are coming in some form (or many forms) and that the agency can play a role not only in supervising but also in assisting this transportation transformation. The DOT is recognizing the wide range of relevant technologies, applications, and business models and is striving to address them more quickly and flexibly through its wide range of prospective and retrospective regulatory tools. (To be pithy: It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile; it can’t be your father’s DOT.)
As always, the devil will be in the details. Those details will become clearer when the agency releases its full guidance on Tuesday and then as that guidance is (1) revised after public comment (for which the DOT wisely provided), (2) augmented by a related report by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, and (3) actually applied. For example, the DOT has not yet indicated whether its model state policy will be permissive or restrictive, particularly with respect to actual demonstration projects and even commercial deployments.
I would also expect that this guidance will be the starting point for more thoughtful legislative discussions — not only at the state level but also, for the first time, at the federal level. It will be interesting to see which developers carry the DOT’s implicit requests for new authorities and resources to Congress. The model state policy does not bind states, and some may well decide not to follow it. The performance guidance likewise does not bind developers of automated driving systems, but I would expect few of these developers to deviate from it. This soft guidance could become even more influential if states incorporate it in legislation, if the DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) considers it in the course of exemption or enforcement decisions, or if courts look to it to understand how a reasonable developer should act. In other words, DOT is establishing expectations.