Development of California Regulations to Govern the Testing and Operation of Automated Driving Systems

Higher levels of road vehicle automation pose a regulatory challenge in the U.S. At the national level, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been responsible for ensuring vehicle safety through the mandatory Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and the voluntary New Car Assessment Program (NCAP). Although NHTSA typically regulates the technology aspects of vehicle safety, state agencies, such as a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), are responsible for the regulations governing training, evaluation, and licensing of drivers, and the registration of vehicles. Automation that allows drivers to disengage from monitoring and control tasks introduces safety concerns related to the vehicle technology (typically regulated by NHTSA) and to the Automated Vehicle’s (AV) driving behavior and compliance with vehicle codes (typically regulated by states). This paper details a variety of issues that need to be addressed in support of state regulations for manufacturers’ testing of AVs on public roads and the general public’s operation of automated driving systems. The key challenges for these regulations are how to ensure public safety without discouraging technical innovations and how to define meaningful requirements in the absence of existing technical standards for automated driving systems. The topics covered in this paper include regulatory models of certification, driver training and licensing requirements, and a discussion of the distinction between behavioral competency (how well the automation handles the environment) and functional safety (how well the vehicle handles internal faults and failures). This information is reported here so that other jurisdictions and institutions that will need to grapple with the same issues will be able to benefit from what we have learned in the process of developing the first comprehensive set of state regulations governing road vehicle automation. Nowakowski, Shladover, Chan, and Tan 3