Congress debates federal regulation on self-driving cars

Fully self-driving cars are already operating in more than two dozen states, but federal rules haven’t kept up. That could change soon. Lawmakers held a Senate hearing recently and are weighing multiple bills on whether autonomous vehicles need national regulation. Public safety is at the center of the debate.

Last December, during a power outage in San Francisco, an observer filmed lines of Waymo robotaxis stopped in their tracks. Traffic lights — which guide the self-driving cars — had gone dark. With no clear signal on how to proceed, the vehicles froze in place.

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, have been picking up passengers on the streets of San Francisco since 2022. Jeffrey Tumlin, who led the city’s transportation agency at the time, said the rollout was chaotic.

“AVs driving into emergency response scenes because they didn’t know what a fire truck or a fire hose was. AVs driving into construction sites and into wet cement.”

Tumlin said before AVs scale further, they need to prove they can safely handle real-world complexity — and lawmakers in Washington agree. Multiple bills are now being debated in Congress.

“Without federal oversight, we risk a fragmented patchwork of state laws that could undermine safety, innovation, and American competitiveness,” Senator Ted Cruz said in early February.

Federal regulations governing vehicle design, construction, and performance already exist — they just haven’t been updated for autonomous vehicles.

Jeffrey Farrah, who leads the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, said those rules were built around the assumption that a human is behind the wheel.

“When you get into a vehicle, you look around you at all the controls — an accelerator pedal, a brake pedal, a steering wheel, a rearview mirror. They’re all put there because a human has been driving vehicles for decades,” Farrah said.

Under the proposals being debated, AV companies would be required to submit what’s known as a safety case — detailed documentation showing how their systems are designed, tested, and validated.

Matthew Wood, vice president of autonomy engineering integrity and validation at May Mobility, said engineers already use safety cases internally. Federal regulation would make them consistent, mandatory, and enforceable.

That means defining how a vehicle minimizes risk when something unexpected happens — from a sensor failure to a citywide power outage or a protest blocking the street.

“What should a vehicle do if it doesn’t know what to do?” Wood said.

Even with federal safety requirements, city streets are still absorbing the steep learning curve of self-driving cars.

And while AV companies work to prove their systems are safe, human drivers remain far deadlier. More than 40,000 people die each year on U.S. roads, most in crashes caused by human error.

Whether federal regulation can reduce that toll — without introducing new risks — is the question.