The proposed carve out inside a federal brake systems rule is the latest in a sequence designed to retire the human driver template from U.S. car safety law. A 30 day public comment window is now open.
The U.S. is preparing to erase its own rulebook for what a car must physically have. The brake pedal is just the latest line to go.
The Department of Transportation's road-safety arm, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has published a proposed rule that would let cars designed to be driven only by software be sold without a brake pedal and, in practice, without most of the cockpit that a human driver is supposed to use. The proposal is narrow on its face: a carve-out inside Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 135, the light-vehicle brake-systems rule, for vehicles "designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems." But the standard it amends is one of the oldest in the federal code, and the brake pedal is the third or fourth human-physiology assumption NHTSA has now systematically stripped out of it.
The proposal is not yet law. The Federal Register's public-inspection version of the NPRM opens a 30-day public comment window before DOT decides whether to finalize. That window is the last civic off-ramp before the rewritten baseline locks in.
Why a brake pedal matters as a proxy: under the current FMVSS, the brake pedal is not just a part. It is the assumption that a human will be in the loop, with feet on the pedals, hands on a wheel, and eyes on the road. For decades, the way to put an automated vehicle on the road inside that template was to ask NHTSA for an exemption from the parts the car lacked. Those exemptions are capped in volume, which is why companies building purpose-built robotaxis have long hit a regulatory ceiling before they hit a manufacturing one. The brake-pedal NPRM is the latest move in a sequence designed to retire that ceiling altogether.
The sequence is now visible. Under President Biden, NHTSA finalized a rule permitting AVs without steering wheels. Late last year, the agency proposed dropping requirements around windshield wiping, defogging, and tire placards for the same class of vehicles. The brake pedal is the next domino in that chain, and the full NPRM text is available on the Federal Register's public-inspection site.
NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison has framed the policy direction in public. At the agency's CES speech, "Road Rules: Governing the Global Shift to Autonomy," he placed U.S. AV rulemaking inside a global race to deploy driverless service, and called the country "on the cusp of the greatest technological revolution… since the Model T." His operational line is sharper: NHTSA is "tearing down pointless barriers." That is a stance, not a technical description, and the technical description is worth stating cleanly. The proposal does not change the safety performance a car has to meet. It changes which physical parts a car has to ship with to meet it.
That distinction is where the honest safety question lives. When a steering wheel, a brake pedal, and a human driver are all removed from the vehicle, "Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards" can no longer standardize the driver. It has to standardize the software stack, the sensors, the redundancy, the fail-operational behavior, and the post-crash reporting regime. The current NPRM is a parts-list change. The regulatory architecture that replaces the parts list is still being written. Legal analysis from Hunton tracks how the FMVSS modernization thread also feeds a separate fight over whether a federal uniform AV standard should preempt the state-by-state patchwork of AV laws. That second-order question is larger than the brake pedal.
The companies that fit the new category best are the ones already building vehicles designed never to carry a human driver. TechCrunch reports that Tesla and Zoox are the named design-fit beneficiaries. The same logic extends to Waymo, to a Cruise rebuilt around a driverless platform, and to any fleet operator whose hardware roadmap no longer includes a steering column. This is a vehicle-generation story about the first U.S. cars built without a human in the loop. Tesla's planned Cybercab is one example of that generation, not the framing of it.
What the next month is for: the 30-day comment window is the moment for fleet operators, safety advocates, disability-access groups, labor unions representing drivers, and state transportation departments to put their concerns on the record before the rule moves from proposed to final. The docket is on the Federal Register public-inspection page. What DOT and NHTSA decide to do with those comments will determine which physical parts the next generation of U.S. road vehicles has to ship with, and which ones it does not.