“What we have right now in the United States is a patchwork approach. Because we don’t have a federal framework,” said Ron Thaniel, senior director for policy and regulatory affairs at Zoox, a maker of robotaxi technology.
Thaniel, speaking on a panel Wednesday at the CoMotion Miami conference, described a regulatory arena where the federal government, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), regulates the design, construction and performance of autonomous vehicles (AVs), while the states regulate their operational safety.
“The city, in most cases, the city does not have a regulatory role,” said Thaniel, who was NHTSA’s director of governmental and external affairs during the Biden administration.
“Right now, though, we have a model where you have some states getting into areas, for example, design requirements of a vehicle,” he said, adding, when states do this, the end result is a patchwork of regulations, which can hinder the widespread scaling of the technology. “We’re not going to win this race like that.”
For now, Thaniel said, the U.S. is a leader in the development of AV technology.
“We have the best companies. We have the best technology right here in the United States. That’s not a given,” he added. “We’re in a race against China.”
For its part, the federal government has eased the regulatory landscape around AVs, waiving the requirements to report crash data for some AVs. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) recently released its Automated Vehicle Framework as part of what it calls its innovation agenda. These efforts to relax the regulatory landscape have safety advocates worried.
“We are disappointed that DOT chose to dilute, instead of enhance, the reporting requirements,” the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety said in a press release.
Thaniel, for his part, stressed safety is absolutely “foundational” if the burgeoning AV industry is to gain any meaningful foothold in the U.S. transportation ecosystem: “It’s foundational in everything that we do.”
AVs are deployed as robotaxis across about half a dozen major metro regions, with more coming. The technology is being added to transit vehicles, most notably in Jacksonville, Fla., where the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) is set to deploy more than a dozen autonomous-equipped Ford vans this summer. JTA plans to order about 100 HOLON Urbans, which are 15-person “purpose-built autonomous vehicles,” once those start rolling off the assembly lines in about two years at a new $100 million AV manufacturing facility in Jacksonville.
“This project in Jacksonville is now going much further than we ever imagined, where it’s now creating jobs and economic opportunity in our community,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., CEO of JTA. HOLON is set to produce at least 5,000 units per year.
Six or seven years ago when the CoMotion conference series began, “everybody really was thinking about the next big mode, the next really cool innovation,” John Rossant, CoMotion founder and CEO, recalled during a separate panel, citing the buzz around AVs.
“Today, it’s much more about thoughtful implementation on the ground with these things,” he said.
That’s often the perspective shared by industry watchers like Thaniel.
“It is no longer 2017, 2018 when we’re talking about ‘test tracks,’ ‘testbeds,’” Thaniel said. “This is 2025, and we have meaningful deployments taking place across the country.”
