The federal brake rule still requires a foot pedal, NHTSA wants to drop that for cars nobody drives, and one law firm just bought everyone another month to argue about it
The federal brake standard still assumes a foot.
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 135 covers light vehicle brake systems, and it requires that the service brake be applied by a foot control and that the parking brake have a separate hand or foot control of its own. That is a problem for a vehicle built without a steering wheel or pedals, and NHTSA proposed on June 26 to fix it by writing the standard in two tracks: one for vehicles with manually operated driving controls, which changes not at all, and one for vehicles designed never to be driven by a person.
Comments on that proposal were due on Monday. They are now due on August 26, under a notice filed for public inspection on Monday morning and publishing on Tuesday.
The extension came from a single request. On July 23 the law firm Varnum LLP asked for 30 more days, telling the agency the proposal addresses highly technical subject matter, raises novel questions, and requires significant time to review so that the firm could advise clients on comprehensive comments. NHTSA found good cause, said the extension was consistent with the public interest, and granted exactly the 30 days requested. Administrator Jonathan Morrison signed it.
Now the substance, because the deadline is the smaller half of this.
The stopping distance requirements do not move. NHTSA says so twice in the proposal, and the reason is the cleanest statement of what the rulemaking is for: a brake system has to stop the vehicle safely once the brakes are applied, and that obligation has nothing to do with whether a foot or a computer applied them. Whether an automated driving system decides to brake at the right moment in a given situation is, in the agency's framing, a separate question about the driving system rather than about the brakes, and NHTSA says it is developing safety performance tests for that in a standard of its own. Until then it points at its defect authority.
Two other pieces of the proposal are worth reading. The agency proposes to remove the requirement in section S5.2 that every vehicle carry a friction type parking brake retained by solely mechanical means, a requirement carried into the standard from FMVSS No. 105 when No. 135 was created in 1995 and which the agency traces to industry practice from a period when total brake failure was more common and split service brake systems were not yet universal. And it observes that a passenger, which is what an occupant of one of these vehicles is, should not be expected to perform a driver function such as setting the parking brake, and that a manual control capable of overriding the automated system could itself introduce a risk through misuse.
The proposal also fixes typographical errors in pedal force and initial brake temperature figures that entered the Code of Federal Regulations in the October 1997 revision and have sat there uncorrected since.
On cost, NHTSA declines to put a number on any of it. It anticipates no new regulatory costs because the action removes requirements rather than adding them, expects no safety disbenefit, and says it cannot quantify how many vehicles might be affected given how early this market is. It adds one line that says more about the state of play than the rest of the analysis: the agency believes such vehicles are more likely to seek exemptions from the standard than to fit equipment they do not need. This is the fourth standard in the series. Earlier this year the agency proposed the same kind of surgery on the rules governing transmission shift sequence, windscreen defrosting and wiping, and tyre and rim load information.
