The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is pushing to finalize new federal safety requirements for autonomous vehicles by 2028, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg2.
The agency plans to solicit public and industry comment to identify "behavioural competencies" for self-driving cars, paired with objective tests designed to measure whether a vehicle is safe for deployment on public roads. Morrison framed the goal in explicitly measurable terms: "so that a manufacturer who is producing the vehicle can know with certainty whether or not the vehicle meets the requirements".
The rulemaking represents a deliberate shift from decades of design-based rules — which assumed a human driver behind the wheel — toward performance-based standards that judge how a vehicle actually behaves. As an example, the new framework would evaluate whether a self-driving system can safely navigate around a double-parked fire truck, rather than assessing what physical controls the vehicle has to handle such a task.
NHTSA proposed last month amending Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) on hardware requirements, a move that is already part of the broader shift. The 2028 target would place the finalized rulebook within the current presidential term.
The rulemaking push comes as robotaxi firms continue to navigate a state-by-state regulatory patchwork in the absence of unified federal standards. NHTSA is also separately targeting autonomous car mishaps as part of its broader regulatory effort1.
ANALYSIS A federal performance-based framework, if finalized on schedule, would replace the current fragmented landscape in which autonomous vehicle operators must secure approvals jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The emphasis on objective, measurable competencies — rather than prescriptive hardware mandates — aligns the regulatory approach with how AV developers already validate their systems internally, potentially reducing compliance friction for companies operating across multiple states.