After examination, Reuters reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has decided not to reconsider its mandate for all new passenger vehicles to feature automatic emergency braking as standard equipment by September 2029. The mandate was put in place in April 2024 as a response to a spike in traffic deaths following the COVID-19 pandemic. The NHTSA estimates that the mandate will save at least 360 lives and 24,000 injuries annually.
While mandating safety equipment might sound good, some of the world’s largest automakers have teamed up to oppose it. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, and other automakers, said the automatic emergency braking mandate by 2029 is “practically impossible with available technology.” In June 2024, the alliance formally requested that the NHTSA reconsider the rule.
Alliance for Automotive Innovation CEO John Bozzella called Monday’s decision from the NHTSA to stick with the 2029 mandate for automatic emergency braking “wrong on the merits. Wrong on the science. Really a disastrous decision by the nation’s top traffic safety regulator that will endlessly – and unnecessarily – frustrate drivers; will make vehicles more expensive and at the end of the day … won’t really improve driver or pedestrian safety.”
The NHTSA mandate doesn’t affect GM very much since all of its consumer-facing vehicles already have standard automatic emergency braking. The issue  is that revised regulations stipulating that vehicles must successfully avoid collisions at speeds of up to 62 mph and detect pedestrians in varying light conditions. Those systems must also automatically apply brakes up to 90 mph for vehicle detection and 45 mph for pedestrian detection. Commercial-oriented vehicles like the Chevy Express and GMC Savana would need to adopt the tech as well, if they’re still around in 2029. However, if the Alliance for Automotive Innovation is correct, the mandate could exacerbate the problem of prohibitively high prices for new vehicles.
Data has been mixed on the real-life effectiveness of driver assistance features like automatic emergency braking in making roads safer. For example, a 2022 study from the NHTSA showed that active safety features reduce crashes and injuries, but a 2020 study by Erie Insurance showed that they’re often turned off, and a 2024 IIHS study concluded that semi-autonomous features make drivers more likely to multitask behind the wheel.
Comments
Do semis have something similar?
Ever driven an 80,000 pound vehicle let alone try to make one come to a complete stop because some jackass isn’t paying attention because his head is glued to his phone? Just because pedestrians have the right of way doesn’t mean you should walk out in front of a moving vehicle.
Don’t worry, Trump will do away with this.
This is a job for DOGE!
BS. I don’t want a car telling me when to apply my brakes. The car applying my brakes against my will, will cause me to get in an accident. Who do I get to sue for causing the accident?
Agreed!!
I turned my auto braking off because it stopped n almost caused me to get rear ended…im good on that
Twice, while renting Toyotas, the nanny features almost killed me. The lane keep assist kept trying to steal me into a wide load while passing and auto braking kept going off on contractor roads. I’m a big NO on all nanny features.
Instead we could stop the road racing in city streets, end all street takeovers, and actually arrest people for dangerous driving, things that are all actually laws. If there’s one thing I Hate, and yes the H word is appropriate here, it’s punishing the masses for the sins of the few.
Calm down, it didn’t “almost kill you”. It caused a startle and slight inconvenience.
So auto braking saves WAY more lives than street racing or street take overs actually cause by far because you know, distracted drivers on their phones. So yeah, lets concentrate on that (which they already do) instead of using tech that actually reduces accidents. Smart guy you are…
Let’s see if you feel the same way when the car behind you crushes yours because your auto braking system malfunctions and jammed on the brakes with full force
You don’t have a right to hold that opinion. If it feels like it almost killed him, that’s more important than what you think about it. He was the one driving. He was the one living the situation. You’re just reading it through the lens of your pro-tech idiocy.
Pro-tech idiocy that you’d think, by now, would have noticed that the tech solutions haven’t actually improved things in the big picture. They’ve just made life worse by adding more complications, once the “cool” factor wears off. If humans aren’t perfect, how could anyone be stupid enough to think that tech built by humans will be?
We’re the ones driving the car. Not the one technology. We are to be the ones ultimately in control. THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID ALL NEGATIVE EVENTS. Accept it, and stop trying to cross lines. And if you think anything different from that, oh, well. It doesn’t count.
“A 2020 study by Erie Insurance showed that they’re often turned off”
Due to false alarms!
The bureaucratic “Let’s mandate it, then have the industry figure it out!” has no place here. These systems need to get a lot better FIRST. Should go without saying that operating a vehicle is a skill and a responsibility, and some things will always need to be trusted to a human and not a sensor.
Too bad most people behind the wheel lack that skill to responsibly operate a vehicle. Look in your rear view mirror at a light and you’ll almost never see eyeballs looking out the windshield, even as they are still moving toward the back of your car. Phones are way more important than driving for most people. Automatic braking may not save you from getting into an accident, but it might save someone else from having a collision with you.
Then it isn’t actually helping. If it doesn’t solve 100% of the situations it applies to perfectly, it’s a waste of time and money that serves no purpose except to make things unnecessarily more complicated.
Think about the phone problem. Don’t just accept that an agency has presented a solution, and ultimately accept it because they’re an agency. Which is the real reason why you agree.
The more people are told that a vehicle will do everything for them, the less they’re going to even try to stay off their phones.
So, since the harsh reality is nothing can be done to stop all phone use and all accidents from ever happening, stop trying to make it worse by throwing in more factors. It’s doing nothing but costing us money, and risking new kinds of accidents, because that’s all the safety tech is doing.
Think.
To err is human, to really eff things up requires a politician. This is just an example of the Biden administration pouring more gasoline on the dumpster fire it created over the past four years
Mine loves to brake at shadows and false readings. These are jokes.
If you really want to prevent accidents then make it where cellphones won’t work while the car is moving.
For Halloween a local town attaches scare crow figures to the lamp posts along the edge of the road through the center of town. The pedestrian detection light on my Trailblazer dashboard came on for about a 1/3 of them. I prefer the audible forward collision alert over emergency braking (even though it occasionally issues false alarms).
Just another unnecessary feature caused by people who think that driving a vehicle is something you do while you’re doing something else. If it becomes mandatory that means it will have to be properly working upon your vehicle inspection.
I have a feature, use GPS to disconnect the cell phone when the vehicle starts moving.
I’ve heard different Honda Civic (2016-2021) owners separately complain that the emergency brakes randomly activated on the highway with nobody around them and forced them to a complete stop. It was bad enough that one of the drivers said they will always deactivate the “safety” system from now on, which he has to do every time he turns on the car.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, an agency “mandates” something. It’s time to understand we don’t have to listen unless we want to, and start doing whatever we want openly. There’s not a single thing the NHTSA can do about it, to us or to automakers who don’t follow. This is ridiculous. There isn’t a single person who should hear the words “automatic braking” and not instantly recognize the stupidity of the concept. Shove it.
So “a total of 42,514 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2022” (www.iihs.org). And big government “estimates” saving 360 lives per year. Then that comes out to 0.8%. A typical big government mandate that is estimated to be 0.8% effective. That’s just great! Hopefully the new administration will neuter the NHTSA.