Toronto, Ontario — Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that the final rule on making automated emergency braking (AEB) technology standard on new vehicles will continue despite industry pushback.
This decision was originally made in 2016, with the NHTSA officially issuing a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard in April 2024.
This new regulation specifically dictates that all new passenger vehicles and light trucks will be required to have AEB systems starting in September 2029.
However, in June of this year, Sarah Puro, vice president for safety and technology policy at the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (AAI)—a trade association and lobbying group that includes many automakers—reportedly wrote a letter to the NHTSA that identified five problems with the administration’s final rule.
According to the AAI’s petition for reconsideration, the organization reported that it was impractical to require the AEB systems to make “no contact” with a lead vehicle or pedestrian test mannequin and that the Final Rule doesn’t allow for multiple test runs. Furthermore, the AAI took issue with the requirement to illuminate the malfunction indicator lamp under all conditions of malfunction, as well as the fact that the rule won’t allow “manual deactivation even under conditions where continued AEB operations would be unexpected or even hazardous.”
Despite assertions that automakers would work with the NHTSA’s requirements, the AAI also asked the NHTSA to reconsider its final ruling.
Still, the NHTSA declined to reconsider with a spokesperson commenting in an official statement that “subsequent to the rule’s publication in April, the agency received several petitions for reconsideration. NHTSA clarified technical requirements applicable to forward collision warning visual signals and audio signals, corrected an error in the test scenario for an obstructed pedestrian crossing the road, and removed superfluous language from the performance test requirement for lead vehicle AEB. This notice denies all other requests in the petitions. The effective date for the rule remains September 2029.”
For Canada, “automatic emergency braking isn’t required on new vehicles in [the country,] but some manufacturers include it as a standard or as an optional feature on some models.” Transport Canada notes that if the country were to move forward with a mandatory adoption, Canadian requirements for pedestrian detection would first have to be developed.
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