NHTSA opens a year-long docket to rewrite its 2017 automated-driving guidance
The agency will replace its nine-year-old ADS 2.0 guidance chapter by chapter, publishing drafts as they are ready and keeping the docket open until July 2027.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a notice on July 31 announcing that it would issue comprehensive updated guidance on the safe development and deployment of automated driving systems, building on the ADS 2.0 guidance it last issued in 2017.
Rather than publishing a single replacement document, the agency said it would release draft guidance on individual topics, or chapters, as they became available. The docket accepts comments for a full year, closing on July 31, 2027, with comments on the initial document listing proposed chapter topics requested within 30 days of publication.
No substantive draft chapters accompanied the notice. The list of candidate topics was filed to the docket rather than reproduced in the notice itself.
The action is procedurally modest and consequentially large. ADS 2.0 was voluntary guidance, and it has nonetheless shaped how automated-driving developers structure safety cases, document system boundaries and describe validation to regulators and insurers on both sides of the Atlantic. Replacing it in open chapters means each element becomes contestable on the record.
It also lands in a crowded week for the agency, which published its automated-vehicle framework updates, an interim exemption guidance document and an interim final rule on temporary exemptions on the same day.