DOT shouldn’t mandate tech before it’s perfected

Last month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing and uttered some words about mandates that I hope he remembers.

“It’s one thing to have a technology available and prototyped,” Buttigieg said. “It’s another thing to mandate it across the U.S.”

Buttigieg made this important distinction when asked about a proposal to require impaired-driving prevention technology on new passenger vehicles.

As part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress directed the DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to begin the rulemaking process to see if the technology could help decrease the more than 13,000 drunk-driving fatalities that occurred in 2021.

NHTSA said that several technologies have the potential to detect such impairments as alcohol, drowsiness and distraction.

However, potential is one thing, and putting it into practice is another.

Although there are technologies with the potential to detect someone who is attempting to drive impaired, NHTSA acknowledged that there are challenges.

Those include being able to distinguish between impairment states, avoiding false positives and applying appropriate prevention countermeasures. The rulemaking doesn’t include drugged driving due to “technology immaturity and a lack of testing protocols.” In addition, the rulemaking would not apply to commercial motor vehicles.

NHTSA received more than 18,000 comments to its advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which was aimed at gathering information to see if a formal proposal is warranted. As you might guess, there were plenty of members of the public concerned about the possibility of having this kind of technology deployed when there are so many unanswered questions.

“This is a horrible idea,” Mark Megarity wrote in his comments to the agency. “Not only because there is no real defined mechanism but also because of the implications to drivers – meaning what about false indications.”

“I do not consume alcohol, but I do not want Big Brother in my car,” Mark Thomas wrote.

“If it’s 99.9% accurate, you could have a million false positives,” Michael Browning wrote. “Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”

As you can see, there are a lot of concerns here. That’s why it was nice to hear Buttigieg’s comment that indicated there should be an extremely high bar for mandating a technology.

While this rulemaking doesn’t apply to commercial motor vehicles, I hope Buttigieg remembers his words when discussing other potential technology mandates for heavy-duty trucks.

One involves automatic emergency braking systems. Last year, NHTSA and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a joint proposal that would require AEB systems on new vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds. We could see a final rule on the heavy-duty version before the year is over. And this is despite thousands of comments from truck drivers who reported problems with the technology, as well as an open investigation into false activations.

It’s one thing for some motor carriers to choose to install a technology on their trucks or for a young truck driver to want the safety net of automatic brakes. But it’s quite another to force veteran truckers with millions of safe miles to use a technology they don’t feel comfortable with and that still has defects.

That’s not the only rulemaking where Buttigieg should follow his own advice. FMCSA has been scheduled to issue a proposal to require speed-limiting devices on most commercial motor vehicles. Safety groups have suggested slowing trucks down to 60 mph even though there are highways in the U.S. where vehicles are allowed to travel as fast as 85 mph. The agency received more than 15,000 comments – the majority of which came from truck drivers who voiced concerns about dangerous speed differentials.

It’s one thing for some motor carriers to choose to install speed limiters a few miles below the posted limit to improve fuel efficiency. But it’s quite another to force nearly every truck on the road to drive well below the speed limit – 20 or 25 mph below in some instances – when there are numerous concerns about the unintended consequences the mandate could cause.

Yep. Potential is one thing. Meeting the threshold of a mandate is another. LL