DVN Analysis by Daniel Stern
As we reported shortly ago, AEB—automatic emergency braking—hasn’t been much of a big topic for the lighting community. It’s tangentially related to driver vision (more like vehicle vision), but the AEB requirements in Euro NCAP are such that the connection isn’t all that strong. The tests for an equipped car to avert or mitigate a collision include nighttime tests done with street lights and low beams (or with no street lights but high beam headlamps lit), so camera detection isn’t a big issue; the street lights help a lot, and low beam performance is not so crucial.
Then came NHTSA’s new PAEB (pedestrian automatic emergency braking) requirements, promulgated as FMVSS 127. Speeds are similar, but the night tests are done with no street lights, on high beam but also on low beam—and also in pedestrian-crossing-the-road scenarios, not just longitudinal pedestrian movement along the road.The low-beam scenario is hard, but maybe feasible with low beam if more light is put to the left of centre, close to the horizontal. But that’s going to aggravate already-pitched complaints of intolerable glare from oncoming and following vehicles.
If ADB were allowed in the test scenario, it could be easier to detect the pedestrian from the side for sure, maybe without the extra glare that will result from changing low beams to help a vehicle pass these tests. But there is no mention of ADB in FMVSS 127; it’s all upper (high) and lower (low) beams.
As it stands now, the requirements of FMVSS 127 present a need and opportunity for close collaboration between lighting and ADAS teams.
But what if it comes to stand differently? A very interesting thing—an unprecedented one—happened shortly ago which could shake all this up. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation is a U.S. lobbying group who describe themselves as the ‘unified voice of the automotive industry’. Formed by the 2020 merger of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers, they describe their mission as ‘working with policymakers to support cleaner, safer and smarter personal transportation that helps transform the U.S. economy and sustain American ingenuity and freedom of movement’.
Automaker members of the Alliance include the BMW Group, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Isuzu, JLR, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Porsche, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, Vinfast, the Volkswagen Group, and Volvo. Tier-1 members include Aisin, Aptiv, Autoliv, Bosch, Denso, Infineon, Luminar, Magna, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, amongst others. That’s quite a who’s-who chunk of the automotive industry.
Just after the inauguration of the Trump Administration, the Alliance filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals against what they’ve framed as “the [previous] Biden Administration’s Department of Transportation”. The lawsuit, which can be read here, seeks a repeal of FMVSS 127 as issued by NHTSA last year. The Alliance says the lawsuit “should not be interpreted as opposite to AEB, a lack of confidence in the technology, or an objection to AEB’s widest possible deployment across the U.S. vehicle fleet. Rather, this litigation is about ensuring a rule that maximizes driver and pedestrian safety and is technologically feasible”.
The lawsuit isn’t sudden or capricious; it comes after a great deal of less-litigious effort by the Alliance. Their June 2024 petition for reconsideration called the FMVSS 127 requirements impracticable and likely to have grave unintended consequences, such as falsely-triggered urgent braking, causing high-speed rear-end crashes.
Just after Donald Trump won the Presidential election, the Alliance wrote him a letter pointing out that FMVSS 127 is out of accord with AEB regulations and guidelines elsewhere in the world, and urged the inbound administration to revisit the rule. In late November, 2024, NHTSA substantially denied the Alliance’s petition for reconsideration, along with four others from individual automakers. Alliance President and CEO John Bozzella called that denial “a disastrous decision (…) that will endlessly—and unnecessarily—frustrate drivers; will make vehicles more expensive; and (…) won’t really improve driver or pedestrian safety”.
So is this futile, or could it gain traction? Maybe it could; as the Alliance points out, it is the prerogative of the Trump Administration to repeal or revise the previous administration’s regulations. We will just have to wait and see. But there might be an interesting parallel here, relevant to the vehicle lighting community
The Alliance also wrote a letter to Congress in June 2024—around the same time as they filed their (doomed) petition for reconsideration—recommending that NHTSA should adopt an AEB standard similar to the European one.
A noteworthy part of that letter reads, “Automakers and suppliers provided NHTSA a series of technical adjustments during the comment period to correct the deficiencies and achieve our shared safety goals. Despite partnering with automakers on AEB in 2016, this time the agency rejected the industry’s feedback (…) after a decade of shared and substantive work on AEB and bn dollars invested, NHTSA inexplicably changed course and issued a rule that automakers indicated was not feasible”. That seems an apt description of the development path of the US ADB regulation, too. If the U.S. AEB rule can be framed as a misstep by the previous administration, and the current administration can be enticed or induced to change it so it’s more like the EU protocol, could the same thing maybe happen with the U.S. ADB rule? Maybe it’s not so far-fetched as it might seem, even if a group like the Alliance hasn’t (yet?) militated for such a move.
To review: J3069, the SAE technical standard for adaptive driving beam systems, was the product of NHTSA asking SAE to translate the U.N. ADB standard into terms compatible with the U.S. legal and regulatory system. As we described in our DVN analysis shortly after NHTSA’s ADB rule was published, Congress ordered NHTSA to adopt SAE J3069, but instead NHTSA rejected SAE J3069 and substituted their own standard, significantly divergent from the SAE standard in ways that necessarily reduce the performance potential and increase the cost of a U.S.-compliant ADB system, compared to the ECE and SAE systems allowed everywhere else in the world.
But there are recent voices right within the U.S. Department of Transportation calling for NHTSA to revisit their decision and adopt SAE J3069. In 2024, the U.S. Transportation Secretary convened TTAC, the Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee, to advise the DOT on innovation. At the end of 2024, TTAC’s 99-page report was published. On page 83, Section 7.4 starts out with boldface type reading, “NHTSA should revise the Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) rule and align itself with the European and Canadian approach to ADB.” The text goes on to say doing so would permit wider and faster adoption of ADB systems, and to criticize the existing NHTSA ADB standard as “reducing flexibility for automakers to install [ADB] at a reasonable cost (…) this rule made the perfect the enemy of the good by forcing a choice between forgoing an ADB system altogether and pursuing a system that meets requirements far more demanding than those in Canada and Europe. In addition, aspects of the rule are inconsistent with other NHTSA regulations. If not adjusted, parts of this rule stand as an obstacle to the deployment of this important safety technology in the U.S. market. With increases in pedestrian fatalities coming primarily at night, [ADB] could help to protect vulnerable road users. But under current NHTSA regulations, ADB systems allowed in Europe and Canada are not allowed in the United States“.
Pete Buttigieg, The Biden Administration’s Transportation Secretary who convened the TTAC, has been swept from office along with the rest of the Biden Administration. And the Department of Transportation as a whole is likely under significant threat of substantial “deletion” by the Trump Administration. Perhaps there will be nobody left at NHTSA or the DOT to change the ADB and AEB rules.
