The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's draft rule would also target a 2,500 vehicle annual cap on autonomous vehicle exemptions, the structural constraint that has kept driverless designs off US roads at scale.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a rule on Thursday that would let vehicles designed to be fully self-driving, including Tesla's planned two-seat Cybercab, ship without a brake pedal, and that targets the 2,500-vehicle annual cap on AV exemptions, the structural constraint that has limited driverless-car deployment in the United States.
The proposal, formally a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking updating FMVSS No. 135 and published in the Federal Register as docket 2026-12981, keeps the same stopping-distance performance standard that applies to every car on the road today. What goes away for vehicles designed from the ground up to be fully autonomous is the requirement that a human be able to operate the brake by hand or foot. Compliance would instead be verified through "alternative testing procedures," which the proposed rule does not yet spell out. The rule is subject to a public comment period before it can take effect.
That second piece is the part that changes who can build what, and at what volume.
Under current Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, any vehicle without manual brake controls needs an exemption. Each approved exemption is capped at 2,500 vehicles per year, a figure designed for low-volume specialty production, not for a commercial fleet of fully driverless taxis. The Cybercab, designed without a steering wheel or pedals, has been the most-cited example of a vehicle the existing rules structurally prevent from shipping at scale. Tesla has told the Wall Street Journal it has not yet applied for an exemption under those existing rules.
The new proposal sits inside Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's broader "AV Framework" and follows an earlier March 2026 NHTSA action modernizing crash-avoidance standards for autonomous vehicles. NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison framed the rule as "tearing down pointless barriers to innovative designs" while "strengthening the fundamental safety requirements that matter," according to the agency's press release.
That framing, in turn, is what makes the safety critique not optional here. The rule removes a hardware mandate and replaces it with a performance standard, but the performance standard has to be enforced somehow. Without a pedal, a regulator cannot inspect for one. Without an exemption cap, NHTSA does not gatekeep each vehicle individually. The substitute is whatever "alternative testing procedures" ultimately look like, and that question is now open in the public comment period.
A Reuters investigation published this year found that Tesla had misrepresented data about its self-driving and self-parking capabilities. Against that record, the procedural question is not academic: it is the difference between a regulator confirming compliance on the front end and a regulator discovering noncompliance on the back end, after vehicles are already on the road. TechCrunch reported that Tesla stands as the most visible beneficiary of the rule change.
The proposal is not final. NHTSA will accept public comments before issuing a final rule, and any production or launch timeline built on the assumption that the rule takes effect as proposed is conditional on that process. For Tesla, for the broader AV industry, and for the small but growing set of US cities preparing for robotaxi service, that process is now the operative variable.