US updates AV safety rules

The clearest sign that Washington is getting serious about driverless vehicles is not a robotaxi launch. It is a tire placard. On April 1, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a narrow change to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 110, the rule that tells automakers where to put tire and loading information on light vehicles. Today that label is tied to the “driver’s side.” NHTSA now wants to let makers of automated-driving-system vehicles without steering wheels or pedals place it on the left side instead, because a vehicle with no human driver does not really have a driver’s side at all (federalregister.gov). That sounds tiny because it is tiny. That is the point. The federal safety code was written for cars built around a person in the front left seat. Once that person disappears, even basic compliance language starts to break. NHTSA said this one-section edit is part of a broader effort to adapt its rules to vehicle automation, and it gave the public until May 1, 2026, to comment (federalregister.gov). The agency has been moving in this direction for months. In September 2025 it announced three other AV-related rulemakings, arguing that standards written decades ago “fail to account for automated vehicles” and need to be modernized for designs with no manual controls (nhtsa.gov). That is the policy side of the story. The enforcement side landed a few days later. On April 3, NHTSA closed its preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s “Actually Smart Summon,” a phone-controlled feature that lets a car creep through a parking lot toward its owner or another selected point. The probe covered about 2.585 million Tesla vehicles, including Model S, X, 3, and Y vehicles equipped with FSD software, and it ended with no recall order (static.nhtsa.gov). Closure did not mean vindication. NHTSA’s own closing resume says the investigation ended “with manufacturer Over-the-Air updates,” not because the agency proved the system was defect-free (static.nhtsa.gov). Reuters, citing the agency, reported that NHTSA explicitly said closing the case “does not mean that no safety-related defect exists” and does not bar future action if conditions change (reuters.com). That language matters because it tells you what regulators think they are doing here. They are not certifying autonomy. They are triaging risk. The risk NHTSA found was real but limited. The agency logged 159 total incidents and 97 crashes after removing duplicates. It found no injuries, no fatalities, no air bag deployments, and no cases where a vehicle had to be towed away (static.nhtsa.gov). Almost all of the reported crashes involved minor property damage. The common pattern was simple: early in a Summon session, the system or the human using the app failed to fully detect the surroundings, especially when the phone view did not give the user a full 360-degree picture. The most frequent impacts were with parking gates, nearby parked cars, and short bollards. NHTSA also identified two crashes in snowy lots where snow partially or fully blocked forward-facing cameras (static.nhtsa.gov). Tesla answered those problems with software. NHTSA said the company pushed over-the-air updates aimed at obstacle detection, camera blockage detection, and the vehicle’s response to moving objects such as gates, along with changes to reduce errors caused by snow or condensation on cameras (cnbc.com). The agency decided the low frequency and low severity of the incidents did not justify more action on this feature. But it also made clear that Tesla’s bigger automation problems are still open. CNBC reported that NHTSA last month upgraded its probe into Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system to an engineering analysis covering about 3.2 million vehicles, a later stage that often comes before a recall (cnbc.com). Put those two moves together and the federal posture comes into focus. NHTSA is rewriting old rules so truly driverless vehicle designs can fit inside the law, one awkward phrase at a time. At the same time, it is still treating real-world automated features as ordinary safety systems that can fail in ordinary ways. One docket is about where to stick a tire label when there is no driver’s door. The other is about Teslas nudging into gates and bollards in parking lots (federalregister.gov) (static.nhtsa.gov).