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Existential Dread

NHTSA Is Rewriting Brake Rules for Cars Nobody Drives. The Standard for the Cars That Kill 38,000 a Year Turned 31.

Dale Impactor III • Clautomotive Desk
August 9, 2026

On June 26, 2026, NHTSA published a proposed rule to modernize FMVSS 135, the federal standard governing how every light vehicle in America stops.[1] The target: autonomous vehicles without human drivers, removing the requirement for a physical brake pedal while retaining stopping distance benchmarks. On the same day, the agency withdrew AV STEP, its voluntary safety evaluation program for AV developers.[2]

FMVSS 135 was published in 1995, when Netscape Navigator shipped on floppy disks and the Chevrolet Cavalier was America's third-best-selling car. In the three decades since, approximately 1.1 million Americans have died in motor vehicle crashes, every one of them in a vehicle governed by the human-driver provisions that NHTSA has elected not to rewrite.[3]

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Fatal crashes involving ADS-equipped vehicles in the FARS dataset, 2014 through 2023

The FARS database covering 2014 through 2023 logs roughly 490,000 fatalities across 337 vehicle models, and not one occurred in a vehicle that would benefit from this proposed amendment. The Cavalier alone accumulated 1,225 deaths across that period at 2.43 per 100 million VMT, with a crash survival rate of 14.3 percent, meaning 86 out of every 100 fatal crash involvements ended in death for someone in or around that car.[3] NHTSA is not rewriting FMVSS 135 for the Cavalier or its descendants.

The strongest counterargument: this framing is partially unfair because FMVSS 135 has been amended before, most significantly when the 2007 ESC mandate required antilock brakes on all light vehicles by 2012, a measure IIHS estimated would prevent 10,000 fatal crashes annually at full fleet penetration.[4] And the ADS rulemaking is prospective, enabling future vehicles that may eventually reduce the human death toll, which makes both points legitimately worth weighing against the critique.

But regulatory bandwidth is finite, and NHTSA administers a safety apparatus covering 280 million registered vehicles while committing rulemaking resources to an ADS fleet numbered in the low thousands. Q1 2026 posted a fatality rate of 0.99 per 100 million VMT across 7,770 deaths, the second-lowest first-quarter rate in American history, while speeding fatalities dropped 11 percent in 2025 to pre-pandemic levels.[5][6] Nobody should dismiss that progress. But 7,770 people still died in three months braking under a standard finalized before Google existed, and the modernization those brakes need does not require removing a pedal from a Waymo.

What to do: The ADS rulemaking comment period runs through August 26, 2026, at regulations.gov, docket NHTSA-2026-0053, and the agency is required to read every submission. Tell them what you think about brake standard priorities for the 280 million vehicles that still have a driver behind the wheel.

Sources & References

  1. NHTSA, “Trump’s Transportation Department Launches Commonsense Updates to Brake Pedal Requirements for AVs,” June 25, 2026. nhtsa.gov
  2. Crowell & Moring LLP, “NHTSA Proposes AV Brake Standard Updates and Withdraws AV STEP Program,” July 1, 2026. crowell.com
  3. NHTSA, Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), 2014–2023. nhtsa.gov
  4. IIHS, “Life-saving benefits of ESC continue to accrue,” 2011. iihs.org
  5. NHTSA, “Traffic Crash Deaths: Early Estimates Jan–March 2026,” July 2, 2026. nhtsa.gov
  6. NHTSA, “Speeding fatalities 2025: 11% decline to 10,035 deaths,” July 2, 2026. nhtsa.gov

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023, Federal Register. FMVSS 135 has been amended multiple times since 1995; this analysis addresses the June 2026 ADS rulemaking scope, in which stopping distance requirements are retained for ADS vehicles. See methodology for additional caveats on FARS data interpretation.