NHTSA Occupant Protection Safety Standards for Vehicles Without Driving Controls

U.S. DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a rule updating the occupant protection Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to account for vehicles with automated driving systems. NHTSA considers “safety across multiple areas, including data collection and analysis, research, human factors, rulemaking and enforcement.” The new standards include the following changes:

• Clarification of the protections that are required for inboard seating positions in the front row of ADS equipped vehicles.
• Clarification that windshield mounting and zone intrusion standards exclude occupant-less vehicles, since these standards meet no safety need in that case.
• The rule notes that “NHTSA believes children should not occupy the “driver’s” position when the vehicle is operating in ADS mode and steering controls are present, given that the driver’s seating position has not been designed to protect children in a crash,” but decided against adopting a vehicle motion suppression requirement due to incomplete information.

The rule is available here. The NHTSA webpage was updated alongside the release of the final rule to include user-friendly information about automated driving systems.