Last month Rep. Schakowsky (D,IL) introduced HR 3401,
a bill that would require the DOT’s National Highway Transportation Safety
Administration (NHTSA) to establish new automotive safety standards for highly
automated vehicles. This bill was introduced the same day that the House Energy
and Commerce Committee amended HR 3388
to do the same thing.
This bill is nearly identical to Section 4 of the revised HR
3388 adopted by the Committee. There is one area where the paragraph numbering
is slightly different, but there are no substantive differences between the
requirements. It would amend 49 USC by adding a new §30129, Updated or new motor vehicle safety standards
for highly automated vehicles.
It would require DOT to “issue a final rule requiring the
submission of safety assessment certifications regarding how safety is being
addressed by each entity developing a highly automated vehicle or an automated
driving system” {new §30129(a)(1)}.
It would also require DOT to submit to Congress a regulatory
and safety priority plan designed to accommodate the development and deployment
of highly automated vehicles while ensuring “the safety and security of highly
automated vehicles and motor vehicles and others that will share the roads with
highly automated vehicles” {new §30129(c)(1)}. That plan would include a
requirement for NHTSA to “identify elements that may require performance
standards including human machine interface and sensors and actuators, and
consider process and procedure standards for software and cybersecurity as
necessary” {new §30129(c)(2)(B)}.
Moving Forward
Ms. Schakowsky is the ranking member of the Digital Commerce
and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee. Normally this would probably allow her to have this bill considered
in Committee. In this case, however, because this bill was introduced the same
day that HR 3388 was, it seems as is the bill was introduced as a backup
measure to ensure that the safety standards provisions of this bill could end
up being considered separately from the remainder of the provisions of the
larger bill if that bill was determined to be too controversial to be
considered on the floor of the House.
I suspect that this bill will not see any further action
until the House Leadership determines whether or not HR 3388 will make it to
the floor. If it does not, this bill will likely be moved to the floor for a
vote without going through a separate review by the Committee.
Commentary
I did not mention the cybersecurity requirements described
above in my discussion of HR 3388 because they were duplicative of the
requirements that I described but were not as expansive as the cybersecurity
requirements in §5
of HR 3388.
What is important (and unusual from a cybersecurity
perspective) here is that both bills would require the establishment for safety
standards for HMI, sensors and actuators. It does not include any guidance on
what those standards would include, but that would normally be expected to be
developed by the technical experts at NHTSA. But this would end up being where
the Federal government took its first crack at developing safety (and perhaps
specific cybersecurity) standards for key components found in (almost by
definition) these critical components of control systems. Those standards could
end up being ground breaking regulatory standards for the ICS industry.
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