- The US has a patchwork of state laws with which autonomous vehicle companies must comply.
- The Trump administration has signaled interest in developing a federal framework for AVs.
- Former DOT inspector general Eric Soskin told BI there are a few ideas the government could explore.
As US companies continue their full-speed race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles, the federal government appears to be trailing behind in regulation.
Companies like Waymo, Tesla, and others heavily invested in robotaxis must navigate a patchwork of state laws, each with its own rules regarding self-driving cars.
For example, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Colorado doesn’t require AVs to have liability insurance. In California, it does.
AV companies argue that these inconsistent rules present a hurdle to the mass adoption of self-driving cars in the US.
It’s why autonomous vehicles are one area where companies turn to the federal government for guidance, Eric Soskin, a former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, told Business Insider.
“Manufacturers in most industries, especially innovators, often say, ‘Hey, I don’t like regulation very much. I want my space to be minimally regulated.'” Soskin said. “But in the autonomous vehicle space, now we’re seeing manufacturers saying, ‘You know what? It would be great if the federal government would take on a bigger role here in the United States.'”
Soskin was the DOT’s inspector general for four years after he was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2020. He was among 18 IGs who were fired in January as the second Trump administration underwent rapid cuts in federal spending under the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Soskin declined to comment on his termination.
The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association — a consortium of companies exploring AVs, including Alphabet’s Waymo and Volkswagen — recently released a proposal for a federal policy framework in an effort to “accelerate the deployment and commercialization of autonomous vehicle technology.”
The framework provides recommendations for safety, transparency, accountability, and leadership advancement, the group said.
The Trump administration also has been said to be looking into easing rules around autonomous vehicles, including reporting requirements by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Bloomberg reported.
In establishing federal rules on self-driving cars, Soskin notes that the DOT could enact some actions while others may require the hand of Congress or the President.
Setting aside those limits, Soskin provided a few approaches and areas the government could address when enacting a federal framework.
Performance-based standards
Soskin said regulating autonomous vehicle companies by setting “performance-based standards” that they reach for rather than implementing specific rules that manufacturers must follow can be a balanced way to encourage innovation while safely rolling out the technology.
Those standards can touch upon issues states and consumers are concerned about, such as how well vehicles can detect other objects in their environment and, generally, how well AVs know what’s happening on the road.
An example is how car companies can choose to submit their vehicles to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to get official safety ratings. Those ratings are then used to advertise to consumers the safety of the vehicles.
“Performance-based standards, or hitting some mark, is going to be a lot more effective in encouraging different routes to getting a solution,” he said.
Cybersecurity and privacy
Autonomous vehicle companies often tout how self-driving cars are safer than cars driven by humans. But for the government to understand the extent to which that is true, companies will need to share a lot of data, Soskin said — and so far, manufacturers and drivers are reluctant to do so.
This is where a set of cybersecurity and privacy standards will be important to assure consumers of the safe handling of their data. The former inspector general said the government could then establish a requirement or incentives for manufacturers to share ride data and crash data.
System redundancies
The government may also want to set a standard for failure modes or system redundancies — in other words, safety features that will kick in if the autonomous driver fails. For example, Volvo says its self-driving trucks have two brake systems so that a secondary brake can stop the truck if the primary system fails.
“What’s supposed to happen when something goes wrong?” he said. “Or when something does go wrong, how do we ensure something else takes over?”
Insurance
Another area that will need to be addressed is liability and insurance.
“The adoption of autonomous vehicles, I think, is going to require that those involved are not held liable in ways that are disproportional to human-operated vehicles,” Soskin said.
In a liability trial, juries may have to determine a compensatory amount when a human is at fault in a collision.
“If X is that number for human-caused liability and a hundred X is that number for autonomous vehicle liability, that would be a huge disincentive to autonomy,” Soskin said. “So thinking about how we set a liability system that permits autonomy to move forward is important and potentially important at the federal level.”
