NHTSA chief: Rule on braking tech could have ‘huge benefit'

WASHINGTON — An upcoming proposed rule from NHTSA on automatic emergency braking, once finalized, could provide a "huge benefit to safety" as the agency seeks to drastically reduce U.S. traffic deaths.

"There's a lot of potential for safety in there," said Steven Cliff, NHTSA's administrator. "Those technologies can avoid crashes altogether or lessen the severity of crashes."

U.S. traffic deaths rose 11 percent in 2021 to nearly 43,000 — the highest count in a single year since 2005, according to preliminary estimates from NHTSA.

By the end of the year, the agency plans to seek comment on a proposal to require automatic emergency braking, including pedestrian detection, on all new light vehicles and set minimum performance standards, as mandated in the infrastructure law passed by Congress last year.

The technology, part of advanced driver-assistance systems, has the potential to save lives and reduce injuries by stopping or slowing a vehicle to prevent a collision but has been problematic for some motorists as it becomes more common across all makes and models. Cliff said the agency is going to get "rules on the books," ensuring the technologies are working properly and that any safety defects are addressed.

"Humans are fallible. People make mistakes," he said. "Those mistakes should not result in a human's death."

Cliff, 52, talked with Staff Reporter Audrey LaForest last month at his office at the U.S. Department of Transportation in his first interview with Automotive News since being sworn in as NHTSA chief. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: NHTSA had been without a permanent leader since 2017. Now, as administrator, what are your top priorities?

A: From day one, I was really focused on getting as many regulations finished as we possibly could. What I kept hearing from stakeholders is NHTSA has taken too long to get mandates on the books, and there's a bunch of new mandates that are in the bipartisan infrastructure law. So knowing that we had a lot of rule-makings that needed to get underway, I wanted to focus on that as one of the major priorities. Those relate to safety, of course, first and foremost, but also things like our climate work in the fuel economy world and generally how we can incorporate more equity and climate into our work.

NHTSA has faced criticism from safety advocates and other groups regarding the significant backlog of its regulatory to-do list. Is the criticism valid?

Rule-making has the force of law, so it has to be done thoughtfully. You want to get it right. The checks and balances that are put in place to make sure that rules can be followed — that they can be implemented, that they're appropriate, that they meet all of the various tests that rule-makings should meet — makes sense. We want rules to be very carefully thought out, so it takes a long time for that process to play out. It's important that we're also getting it right, so things can't be done too hastily. We have to embark on research, do data gathering, look at what's available in the market, provide objective tests for those technologies and then give appropriate lead time for the industry to implement all of those policies.

The agency last month released first-of-its-kind data on crashes linked to advanced driver-assistance systems and fully automated-driving systems — but there were some caveats. Given the data limitations, was the release premature?

The reports that we put out put into context what the data represent. The caveats there were not intended to suggest that the data aren't important or that it's lacking in any way, just that if you're trying to use the data to compare systems, you need to understand that there are various considerations that factor into that. We felt that it was necessary to be transparent. We are gathering data, people want to know what's in the information that we're receiving, so we always had made a commitment to make it public as soon as we possibly could.

It took a while for us to go through and understand the redundancy of reports and all of the various caveats, and then get that put out the door. Over time, we may learn that there's additional information we need to collect. We're starting to internally think about things that we want to follow up on and gather more hypotheses about what's going on, but those need to be tested. So it's premature for us to make a lot of conclusions, but it's also important for us to put that information out, and I think it's a great step.

How is the data gathered from the crash-report mandate helping the agency as it prepares to issue a proposed rule-making on automatic emergency braking?

The information that we're getting from the Standing General Order can help us understand some of those technologies. But pedestrian automatic emergency braking or automatic emergency braking in passenger vehicles we know can enhance safety because of its ability to avoid crashes or lessen the severity of crashes, and that's an opportunity to leverage technology where we know there's a safety benefit. Combined, they achieve certain levels of autonomy but in and of themselves, it is just a technological response that can enhance safety, while providing benefits to drivers that is really automatic.

It's included in some cars today, but increasing the stringency, mandating it in all vehicles and having objective tests that need to be met in order to comply, are going to provide huge benefits to all drivers and other road users who might be impacted by crashes.

Another provision in the infrastructure law orders NHTSA to issue a final rule by November 2024 requiring new vehicles to be equipped with an advanced drunken- and impaired-driving prevention technology. What are you hearing from automakers?

First, the bipartisan infrastructure law provided not only a timeline but resources to help us get that rule-making done. We included in the agenda the [advanced notice of proposed rule-making] so that we can start seeking information from any of the stakeholders that have data that they can provide. That's either manufacturers of the vehicles themselves or the technology providers or the public that can provide information about the technology.

I think there's a lot of work to do. The technology is good. We've done a lot of work over many, many years, a lot of research we've supported for more than a decade, research on the [Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety] program, but there is a lot of work to do to introduce something like that into vehicles, into an environment like an automobile, which is a relatively harsh environment for technology to live.

We know there's more work to do, and we're looking forward to continuing the efforts there. To answer your question directly, automakers have not pushed back at all, to me, on that technology.