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The Trump administration will make it easier to deploy self-driving cars on US roads and loosen crash reporting requirements, the most significant changes yet to federal rules on autonomous vehicles championed by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk.
“This administration understands that we’re in a race with China to out-innovate, and the stakes couldn’t be higher,” US transportation secretary Sean Duffy said on Thursday. “Our new framework will slash red tape and move us closer to a single national standard that spurs innovation and prioritises safety.”
The changes by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) were central demands of Musk and his electric-vehicle maker Tesla, which has pioneered driver assistance and autonomous software on its more than 2mn US vehicles.
Tesla plans to roll out a fleet of Cybercabs — futuristic models without steering wheels or pedals — in Austin, Texas, this June. To win approval, the company needs an exemption from the NHTSA to operate a non-standard car on American roads, something only one start-up has achieved.
Musk has called for a national framework for driverless cars to supersede a patchwork of state and city-level rules that make it difficult to gain profitable scale.
The world’s richest man has also vociferously criticised NHTSA’s stringent crash reporting requirements. These rules have become the main power used by the regulator to open investigations into the failings of Tesla’s software, because there are no federal regulations in place to specifically govern autonomous vehicles.
NHTSA has eight open probes into crashes, five of which involve Musk’s claims about the capabilities of the company’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system. Despite its name, FSD still requires humans to sit in the driver’s seat and pay full attention — unlike Google’s Waymo taxis.
The NHTSA said it would “streamline” the crash reporting rules to “sharpen the focus on critical safety information while removing unnecessary and duplicative requirements”.
A Financial Times investigation this month revealed that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) had fired many newer employees at NHTSA who were involved in assessing self-driving risks, raising concerns among current and former staff of potential conflict of interest for Musk given the high stakes for Tesla.
Duffy’s changes will allow US carmakers to be exempt from certain procedures for self-driving vehicles as long as they are only used for research, demonstrations and other non-commercial purposes.
In an open letter to developers of autonomous vehicles, NHTSA promised to remove “unnecessary regulatory barriers that stand in the way of both safety and progress”.
Musk is also seeking a wider remit to deploy FSD in China, but the approval process has been complicated by President Donald Trump’s trade war. Tesla faces stiff competition from Chinese rivals such as BYD, which released its free advanced self-driving system, dubbed God’s Eye, in February.
