NHTSA Called Autonomous Vehicles a “Danger to the General Public.” Three Weeks Ago, It Stopped Counting Their Crashes.

Jonathan Morrison, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a letter this week declaring that autonomous vehicles pose a “danger to the general public” for driving directly into active emergency scenes, blocking ambulances and fire trucks, and failing to recognize flashing lights, flares, smoke, and traffic cones.^[1] He called the behavior “unacceptable” and promised enforcement. On June 16, the agency he runs gutted the Standing General Order — the only federal system that forced AV companies to report every crash within 24 hours.^[2]

The SGO, issued in June 2021, built the most comprehensive AV crash dataset any government has ever assembled: 130 ADS-equipped vehicle crashes and 392 Level 2 driver-assist incidents in its first year alone.^[3] It captured the 16 Teslas that slammed into parked fire trucks, the data that forced a 363,000-vehicle FSD recall.^[4] Then NHTSA rewrote the reporting triggers, stretched the timelines, and narrowed what counts as reportable. The amendment took effect three weeks before Morrison sat down to write that AVs are dangerous. He was citing the dataset his own agency had just decided to stop building.

Morrison’s letter described emergency scenes as “neither rare nor extreme edge cases,” a direct rebuke to the industry’s favorite euphemism for failures it hasn’t bothered to engineer around. Waymo told reporters it handles active emergency encounters 50,000 times per week.^[1] Tesla did not respond. NHTSA has documented at least 273 crashes involving vehicles with advanced driver-assist active at impact, and 69.6 percent involved Tesla.^[5] The agency noted Tesla’s telematics report crashes faster than competitors, which could inflate its share. That caveat was worth more when there was still a counting system to inflate.

You cannot regulate what you stop measuring. NHTSA spent four years building the infrastructure to understand how autonomous vehicles fail, and it produced exactly the evidence Morrison is waving in his letter. A competent regulator would have used it to tighten reporting requirements and expand enforcement. This one wrote an angry letter and continued dismantling the mechanism that generated the evidence. The counterargument: the amendment wasn’t a full repeal, and AV companies have self-reporting capabilities that exceed the old mandate. Fair enough, assuming you trust the companies Morrison just called dangerous to honestly report the crashes that make them look dangerous. NHTSA’s own data tells you how well that assumption holds: Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second before impact in the first-responder crashes, and driver attention warnings were issued in just two of 16 incidents.^[5]

If you share the road with autonomous vehicles, your legal protections haven’t changed: impeding emergency vehicles carries fines of $100 to $1,000 in most states, and AVs are not exempt. But there’s no mechanism to cite software, no license to suspend, and now a diminished system for tracking how often violations occur. If a driverless vehicle blocks an ambulance near you, report it at nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem and document everything: dashcam footage, timestamp, plate. Someone should be counting, even if the regulator decided to stop.