NHTSA moves to fast-track the first federal performance standards for automated vehicles

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed NHTSA to accelerate development of the first federal performance standards for automated vehicles and to streamline the exemption processes that currently gate deployment.

The agency will fund a three-year, $5 million research consortium — A2SCEND, run with SAE Industry Technologies Consortia — to develop the technical basis for AV performance standards. In parallel, NHTSA proposed or signaled updates to ten Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards written for human drivers, covering areas from transmission controls and braking to mirrors, lighting and occupant protection, with the stated goal that individual exemptions become unnecessary for vehicles without conventional controls.

The package includes a temporary exemption allowing Zoox to deploy robotaxis commercially, and follows the Department of Transportation’s unified rulemaking agenda published on July 7. NHTSA also withdrew its January 2026 “AV STEP” proposal for a voluntary oversight program, replacing the incremental approach with rulemaking.

For vehicle-software organizations, the direction matters more than the timeline: performance standards define testable requirements that automated-driving stacks must be engineered and validated against, in a market that has so far lacked a federal target.