Federal motor vehicle safety standards were written for cars that have drivers. They require a steering wheel, mirrors, and controls a person can reach, because the whole regulatory model assumes a human being is the last line of defence when the machine gets something wrong.
NHTSA has now exempted Amazon's Zoox from those requirements, clearing commercial deployment of up to 2,500 vehicles a year for two years, beginning in Las Vegas. [1] Five thousand vehicles, over two years, with no controls for a human to take.
The fair reading of the exemption process: it exists because a purpose-built driverless vehicle physically cannot comply with rules that mandate a steering wheel, and refusing every exemption would mean the technology could never be tested on public roads at all. Congress built the mechanism deliberately. Using it is not a scandal.
What an exemption is supposed to rest on is evidence, and critics say the evidence here is thin. [1] The most recent public data point is not encouraging: in July, Zoox recalled 105 vehicles over software that failed to detect heavy smoke in emergency situations. [1] A vehicle that cannot see smoke is a vehicle that cannot see a fire, and a fire is exactly the circumstance in which a human passenger would most want a wheel to grab.
The recall does not mean the exemption is wrong. It means the timing invites a specific question that the public record should answer: what did NHTSA see, three weeks after that recall, that satisfied it about the same software stack.
Las Vegas gets the answer first, at up to 2,500 vehicles a year.
