The National Transportation Safety Board has commented criticizing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its permissive regulation of driver assistance systems. The letter dated February 1, but was only seen by CNBC’s Lora Kolodny on Friday. The letter repeatedly calls Tesla’s autopilot for its relaxed safety practices and asks NHTSA to set minimum standards for the industry.
The dispute between federal agencies is the result of the congressional division of responsibility for transportation security between various agencies. NHTSA is the main road safety regulator: every car and light truck must comply with the standards established by NHTSA. The NTSB is a separate agency that only does security investigations. When there is an accident on a high-profile highway, NTSB investigators go to the scene to find out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. The NTSB also makes plane and train accidents, allowing you to apply lessons from one mode of transport to others.
This separation of responsibilities contributed to a culture gap between the agencies. As the agency responsible for drafting the regulations, NHTSA has to negotiate security with other considerations such as economic costs, the lobbying power of automakers and the risk of consumer reaction. In contrast, the NTSB’s decisions are purely consultative, which frees the agency to doggedly defend strong security measures.
Under then President Donald Trump, NHTSA largely let car manufacturers do what they wanted when it came to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and driverless vehicle prototypes. NHTSA generally waited until security problems arose with the ADAS system and dealt with them after the fact. The NTSB argues that NHTSA should be more proactive and has put Tesla and Autopilot at the center of its argument.
NTSB believes that minimum ADAS security standards are lagging behind
The NTSB thinks that NHTSA has been too slow to develop safety standards for driver assistance systems and too slow to enforce its use in all vehicles. An increasing number of cars have automatic emergency braking systems, but these systems are not yet mandatory, and different AEB systems have different features.
“It is important for the agency to prioritize the development of minimum performance standards for collision avoidance technologies and to require the systems as standard equipment on all new vehicles,” wrote the NTSB.
The NTSB also calls on NHTSA to require driver monitoring systems to ensure that drivers are paying attention to the road while driver assistance systems are active.
“Since driver attention is an integral component of low-level automation systems, a driver monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor,” argued the NTSB. “There are no minimum performance standards for the appropriate alert time, the type of alert or the use of redundant monitoring sensors to ensure driver engagement.”
Many driver assistance systems on the road today use torque sensors on the steering wheel as a rudimentary way of knowing whether drivers have their hands on the steering wheel. More recently, some manufacturers have used eye tracking cameras to monitor the driver’s attention. They are a more effective way to make sure that users are really looking at the road – although some drivers may find them intrusive or annoying.
Finally, the NTSB argues that NHTSA should require car manufacturers to limit the use of driver assistance systems to the type of roads for which they were designed. For example, some ADAS systems are designed to work only on limited access roads. However, few cars actually impose such limitations. Many systems can be activated on roads for which the systems were not designed.
NTSB repeatedly highlights Tesla
The NTSB mentions Tesla 16 times in the report – far more than any other automaker. This is partly due to the fact that Tesla vehicles have featured prominently in the work of the NTSB. The NTSB says it investigated six accidents involving driver assistance or self-directed systems between May 2016 and March 2019. Four of them were fatal. One of these four was the death of Elaine Herzberg in 2018, after she was run over by a standalone Uber prototype. The other three were Tesla owners who were too dependent on autopilot and it cost them their lives.
In one section, the NTSB points to the 2016 death of Tesla owner Josh Brown. Brown’s autopilot software failed to recognize a semi-trailer passing in front of the vehicle. Brown’s Model S slid under the trailer, tearing off the car’s hood and killing Brown instantly.
In its report on the accident, the NTSB noted that, at the time of the accident, the Autopilot software was designed only for use on controlled access highways – not on rural highways where cars and trucks can enter the highway directly from sidewalks and side streets. The NTSB noted that its Brown accident report “recommended that NHTSA develop a method to verify” that companies that sell driver assistance systems like Autopilot have safeguards to prevent customers from using the systems on the roads for which were not designed. This system may have prevented Brown from activating autopilot on the day of his death.
NHTSA did not follow NTSB’s suggestion. In its February letter, the NTSB does not allow NHTSA to forget this: the NTSB suggests that this policy choice may have led to another deadly crash.
“In March 2019, because of NHTSA’s lack of appropriate safeguards and inertia, another fatal accident occurred in Delray Beach, Florida, under very similar circumstances” to Brown’s death, the agency wrote. And the NTSB fears that negligent rules could lead to more deaths in the future.
“The NTSB remains concerned about NHTSA’s continued failure to recognize the importance of ensuring that acceptable safeguards are in place so that vehicles do not operate outside their operational design domains and beyond the capabilities of their system designs,” he wrote. the agency. “Since NHTSA has not set requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the limitations of the AV control system.”
The NTSB then called Tesla again, specifically criticizing the decision to release its “fully autonomous beta” software to a few dozen customers.
“Tesla recently launched a beta version of its Level 2 Autopilot system, described as having full autonomous steering capability,” wrote the NTSB. “In launching the system, Tesla is testing highly automated AV technology on public roads, but with limited supervision and reporting requirements.”
Since the NTSB letter, Elon Musk has announced plans to expand the FSD beta to more customers.
The NTSB letter arrived at a crucial moment – just when President Joe Biden was holding senior positions at NHTSA and the broader Department of Transportation. Under Donald Trump, NHTSA has taken a strongly hands-off stance towards the regulation of driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technology. It seems likely that Biden’s team will do more in this area, but it remains to be seen how aggressive it will be.