The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has jurisdiction over the manufacturing standards for all new vehicles – cars, trucks, buses, and trailers. While the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) tells motor carriers how they must operate and maintain today’s vehicles, NHTSA rulemakings tell manufacturers how to equip those vehicles in the future.
Thus, NHTSA impacts the safety, efficiency, and cost of tomorrow’s trucks. That’s why fleets must watch NHTSA actions, as well as those of FMCSA, and why carriers should file comments on NHTSA rulemakings.
The recent Significant Rulemaking Report from the U. S. Department of Transportation shows three truck-specific rulemakings at NHTSA. As a reminder, “significant” rulemakings come with a major economic impact or may interfere with the plans of other regulatory agencies, such as FMCSA. In other words, the “significant” rulemaking label means “pay attention.”
Here are those three truck-specific significant rulemakings:
Heavy Vehicle Automatic Emergency Braking. This NHTSA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will seek comments on requiring and/or standardizing equipment performance for automatic emergency braking (AEB) on heavy trucks. For several years, NHTSA has researched forward collision avoidance and mitigation technologies on heavy trucks. NHTSA will include test procedures for measuring the performance of forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking systems. This rulemaking is conducted jointly with FMCSA, who will enforce the presence of AEB and its maintenance for the service life of the truck, once required by NHTSA. Projected publication date: Jan. 30, 2023.
Retroreflective Tape and Underride Guards for Single Unit Trucks. Heavy trucks are already required to have retroreflective tape and rear underride guards. Now NHTSA is considering extending those requirements to single-unit trucks common in many motor carrier fleets. Projected publication date: undetermined.
Heavy Vehicle Speed Limiters. Another joint rulemaking with FMCSA. Where FMCSA has said it will publish a Supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on speed limiters on June 30, 2023, NHTSA has not announced a publication date. We do know that the proposed speed limiters would affect trucks with gross vehicle weight rating of 26,001 pounds or more, when equipped with an electronic engine control unit (ECU) capable of governing maximum speed. Carriers would be required by FMCSA to limit the truck to the speed determined by the joint rulemaking and maintain that ECU setting for the service life of the vehicle. NHTSA would focus on the technical requirements of the speed limiters.
In its significant rulemakings, NHTSA also had several related to passenger car technologies or standards of today which could become proposed new truck regulations in the future. PrePass will explore those possibilities in a separate blog.
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