For at least 100 years, automakers have stuck to a tried and trusted playbook: They’ll kick, scream, and obfuscate before they’re forced by law to fit profit-draining, life-saving technology. From their successful rejection of speed governor proposals in the 1920s, to their shaming by lawyer Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed published in 1965, which inspired the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US, auto companies—Volvo excepted—have rarely incorporated safety features willingly.
True to form, a lawsuit filed January 17 by the auto industry’s leading lobbying group seeks to repeal a safety rule that would make automated emergency braking standard equipment in all cars—something that NHTSA estimates will save at least 362 lives every year, but which road safety groups expect will save many more, perhaps even tens of thousands more.
The auto industry claims the rule will be almost impossible to implement. Road safety experts say this is patently false, and accuse car companies of balking at the cost of fitting upgraded braking kit as standard, despite the lifesaving potential.
According to an OECD report released on the last day of December, Americans are far more likely to die in car crashes than those living in other rich countries. The per capita crash death rate is three times higher in the US than Ireland, Norway, UK, Germany, or Japan. Only those living in Costa Rica and Colombia fare worse.
The new US rule isn’t a diktat from a nannying European Union; it’s a homegrown one and, unusually, is even tougher to meet than a similar EU law in force across Europe since 2022. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 127—FMVSS 127 for short, introduced last July—gives automakers four years to fit all cars and light trucks with advanced, always-on automatic emergency braking (AEB) technology that, in a “crash imminent situation,” states the regulation, will “automatically apply the vehicle brakes if the driver has not done so.”
Low-speed AEB—marketed as Eyesight by Subaru and Pre-Collision Assist with Automatic Emergency Braking by Ford—has been around since the mid-1990s, but FMVSS 127 stipulates that the technology should work at higher speeds, and in darkness, and should not be an optional add-on but fitted as standard.
NHTSA began testing AEB systems as part of the government’s five-star safety rating program known as the New Car Assessment Program, or NCAP, in 2010, and soon thereafter listed them as “recommended advanced technology” but did not mandate their fitting.
Now, the systems “have reached a level of maturity to make a significant contribution to reducing the frequency and severity of crashes and are thus ready to be mandated,” says a NHTSA notice on the Federal Register.
Mandating advanced AEB systems would “address a clear and growing safety problem,” states NHTSA, asserting that “to wait for market-driven adoption … would lead to deaths and injuries that could be avoided if the technology were required.”
NHTSA estimates that equipping new cars and trucks with advanced AEB will cost the auto industry $354 million. Automakers say it will be more than that, and they make no secret that one of their core objections to FMVSS 127 is that it will cut into their profits.
The Washington, DC–based Alliance for Automotive Innovation told NHTSA that the “proposed phase-in schedule may require redesigns outside of the normal product development cycle” and that this “would significantly increase costs.”
The Biden administration stipulation—mostly achievable with software tweaks, not hardware upgrades—was labeled as “flawed” by the Alliance, which filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. In addition to the lawsuit, the trade association and lobby group—which represents Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Toyota, and others—also wrote to President Trump urging him to “re-open the AEB rule.”
Safety groups are hoping Trump will ignore the Alliance’s pleas. FMVSS 127 is the “most impactful regulation for roadway safety issued in years,” says Cathy Chase, president of DC-based Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. On a video call she tells WIRED: “The auto industry does not like regulation. From airbags to electronic stability control, to pretty much every safety regulation that you can think of, the auto industry in one way or another did not want it.”
“We lose 42,800 people a year to traffic violence [in the US],” says Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. “This is due in part to our habit of asking [automotive companies] for [their] permission in matters of public safety.”
“We didn’t ask theater owners for permission to require fire exits,” he says. “Government ordered theatre owners to install fire exits; horrific death tolls fell. If a theater owner said ‘Installing a fire exit is too expensive,’ government replied ‘Then we’ll make failure to install a fire exit even more expensive for you.’”
“This principle applies with equal validity to automobile brakes,” says Norton. “We can ask industry how we can make implementation less burdensome, but we must not ask them whether the regulation is necessary—industry’s private interests and our public interests are different.”
Under FMVSS 127, cars and light trucks will be required to be able to “stop and avoid contact” with other motor vehicles at speeds of up to 62 mph. AEB systems must also apply the brakes automatically “up to 90 mph when a collision with a lead vehicle is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected.” Vehicle sensors must also detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness.
In a letter to Congress in June last year, Alliance president and CEO John Bozzella claimed that meeting FMVSS 127 would be “practically impossible with available technology.”
However, a close read of several brands’ owner manuals suggests otherwise. The 2022 Toyota Prius Prime manual states that its system’s maximum AEB activation speed is 112 mph; ditto for the 2022 Lexus NX 250. The 2023 Hyundai Palisade owner’s manual lists the maximum AEB activation speed as 124.27 mph. Similarly, owner’s manuals from Volvo, Tesla, and other companies show that high-speed AEB activation has been on the market for years.
“[FMVSS 127’s] requirements are achievable,” Joe Young, the media director of the insurance-industry-backed Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tells WIRED, “especially given the lengthy time frame that NHSTA has given the automakers.”
The AAA’s director of automotive research, Greg Brannon, agrees, stating that the new standard is “very challenging … but it is possible.”
“We’ve been testing automatic emergency braking systems for well over a decade, and FMVSS 127 is definitely a jump, but the important thing to note about many of the higher-speed scenarios is that the standard only requires fully automatic emergency braking up to 50 miles an hour,” says Brannon. Speeds higher than this will include dynamic brake support, which sees the driver initiating the braking sequence. “The AEB system at those higher speeds doesn’t have to guess whether or not it should be braking,” he says.
The most challenging part of FMVSS 127 is the night-time Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) test, which, unlike the EU’s new AEB regulation, needs to work in complete darkness. More than 70 percent of pedestrians hit and killed by motorists are struck at night, according to NHTSA.
Protecting pedestrians at night is “likely to require further advancements and developments in sensor technologies,” states Nadine Wong, director of track testing at independent testing company Dynamic Research. Working from a test track 15 miles north of Bakersfield, California, Dynamic Research already conducts FMVSS 127 testing for clients. “We know that there are vehicles currently available that already come close to achieving the standard,” said Wong.
NHTSA acknowledges that FMVSS 127 is “technology-forcing,” but emphasizes that the “standard is practicable.”
While the industry would be on the hook for $354 million in mostly software development costs, US society would benefit to the tune of up to $7.26 billion, says NHSTA, citing reductions in costs for the “negative externalities” of serious car crashes such as emergency service call-outs, medical care, insurance administrative costs, workplace costs, and legal costs.
“Considering that automaking is America’s largest manufacturing sector, employs 10 million Americans, generates 5 percent of the US GDP, and drives $1 trillion into the economy annually,” says Chase, “it is remarkable that [the auto industry] would be unable to meet the requirements in the AEB rule by September 2029.”
In a press statement, William Wallace, Consumer Report’s director of safety advocacy, agreed: “It is profoundly disappointing that automakers are suing to block this lifesaving automatic emergency braking rule.”
Shaun Kildare, research director at the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, concurs. “When they say, ‘It’s impracticable, we can never meet this standard,’ it’s false because some auto companies are already selling vehicles in the US that do it,” he says, “and they’re definitely selling vehicles abroad that do it. [Auto companies] just don’t want to pay for it on every vehicle.”
Still, the Alliance’s Bozzella has called FMVSS 127 a “disastrous” rule that “will endlessly—and unnecessarily—frustrate drivers [and] make vehicles more expensive.” Somewhat strangely, Bozzella also claims that the more stringent standard, tougher even than the equivalent one in EU, “won’t really improve driver or pedestrian safety.”
However, the Alliance’s lawsuit ought to fail, says Chase. “NHTSA is risk averse. They like everything buttoned up. They would not have put out this rule if they thought it could be easily challenged.”
Late last year, NHTSA released a set of studies showing that more than 860,000 lives have been saved by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards since 1968. Frontal air bags alone have saved more than 50,000 lives over a 30-year period, estimates NHTSA.
President Trump has nominated Steven Bradbury to be the secretary of transportation. Bradbury is a fellow at right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, which wrote Project 2025, a 900-plus-page blueprint for government that Trump disavowed during the election.
Project 2025’s transportation plans include reducing fuel economy standards and removing highway spending from pedestrian and bicycling projects. Project 2025 was also in favor of smaller government and fewer regulations, an ask likely to be supercharged by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
It’s unclear what President Trump, the DOT, or DOGE will do with FMVSS 127, but, says Norton, author also of a book on autonomous driving, “if we can’t get automakers to accept vehicle automation for safety, then we can’t expect them to be serious about fully robotic cars.”
Source : Wired
