OMB Approves two Automated Driving Rules

Earlier this week the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) approved two advanced notices of proposed rulemaking (ANPRMs) from DOT agencies starting the regulatory process on two separate automated vehicle regulatory actions. The first was a rulemaking from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) on “Removing Regulatory Barriers for Automated Driving Systems”. The second was from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) on “Safe Integration of Automated Driving Systems-Equipped Commercial Motor Vehicles”.

Both of these rulemaking submissions were approved pretty quickly. The NHTSA ANPRM was submitted on March 14^th, 2019 and the FMCSA ANPRM on March 21^st, 2019. ANPRM’s are the first step in the rulemaking process and typically propose a list of questions that the agency would like answered by the regulated and affected communities before they actually propose regulatory action.

There is no telling when these ANPRMs will actually be published in the Federal Register. There is no procedural reason that it should be more than a couple of days, Both rulemakings were approved by OIRA ‘consistent with change’ so I suspect that it will probably be at least a month before these ANPRMs are published given the rulemaking history of the Trump Administration.