In a two-page letter addressed simply to “Driverless Automated Driving System Developers,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s administrator, Jonathan Morrison, told the industry that a recurring failure had become impossible to ignore — autonomous vehicles that do not know how to behave around police officers, firefighters and paramedics.
The agency said it had documented multiple instances of driverless cars driving into active emergency scenes and blocking the paths of ambulances and firefighters, or failing to recognize and respond to basic safety conditions like flashing lights, flares, smoke, fire and traffic cones. In the letter, Mr. Morrison did not mince words about what that means for the technology’s credibility. “An AV that cannot safely interact with first responders is a danger to the general public,” he wrote.
A pattern the agency says it can no longer treat as background noise
The letter arrives after months of scattered but mounting incidents involving robotaxi fleets, most of them operated by Waymo, the Alphabet-owned company that has become the most visible face of driverless ride-hailing in American cities. Local media in Texas reported that a Waymo vehicle in Dallas partially blocked a route fire trucks were using to reach a burning apartment building in late May. Other videos have circulated showing Waymo vehicles blocking an ambulance and driving through an active police scene.
Both NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are now investigating separate incidents involving Waymo vehicles, including one in which the cars passed stopped school buses with their lights activated, in violation of Texas law, and another from January in which a self-driving Waymo struck a nine-year-old girl in a Santa Monica school zone as she ran from behind a double-parked S.U.V.
The scale of the problem, according to public comments filed with the agency earlier this year, may be larger than the handful of viral videos suggest. In written comments submitted to NHTSA’s own docket on the subject, one filer cited San Francisco’s fire chief as having documented 55 instances of robotaxis interfering with emergency responses in a single year, and described a December power outage in which more than 1,500 Waymo vehicles became disoriented at once, so overwhelming the company’s remote assistance system that a 911 dispatcher was left on hold with Waymo’s first responder hotline for the better part of an hour.
From Goldilocks deregulation to a call to action
The letter is notable for the position it stakes out within an administration that has otherwise made loosening restrictions on autonomous vehicles a signature priority. Mr. Morrison opened by cataloging that record: a new federal framework for the technology, an effort to prevent American developers from facing tougher rules than their foreign rivals, and what he called the slashing of redundant red tape, along with the agency’s first-ever summit dedicated to the technology.
He described the balance the agency is trying to strike, under Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, as a “Goldilocks approach” — clearing obstacles to innovation while keeping safety squarely in view. But the letter made plain that first responder interactions had moved from a peripheral concern to a central one. Emergency scenes, Mr. Morrison wrote, are not rare or extreme edge cases that developers can reasonably expect to encounter only occasionally; they are a routine part of American roadways, and a vehicle that cannot navigate around them safely has what he called a functional insufficiency — agency language for a defect serious enough to warrant scrutiny.
He also drew a pointed comparison to human motorists, who face fines and even jail time for impeding emergency vehicles. When a driverless car does the same thing, he argued, it can no longer be waved off as a minor software anomaly.
Meetings by month’s end, and a reminder that enforcement is still on the table
NHTSA’s letter did not name the companies it is targeting, nor did it detail the incidents it says it has documented. The agency has said it will schedule meetings with driverless vehicle developers by the end of the month to hear their proposed solutions, and Mr. Morrison noted that the agency will continue to exercise its enforcement authority against developers that fail to address significant safety concerns. “Public trust on our roads is earned, not given,” he wrote.
The move builds on a broader push at the agency this year to formalize how it evaluates autonomous vehicles, including proposed updates to long-standing vehicle safety standards and what officials have described as the first major federal safety guidance for the sector since 2017. Advocates who have pressed NHTSA on the first responder issue have argued that the industry has treated the problem primarily as one of training and paperwork — publishing guides and briefing local departments — when it should be treated as a design problem, built into the vehicles and their fleet systems from the start, the way aviation and medical device regulators require human-factors engineering for safety-critical systems.
An industry that has invested in outreach, but not, critics say, in the underlying fix
Waymo, which has trained thousands of first responders across dozens of agencies on how to interact with its vehicles, has positioned itself as a willing partner on the issue rather than a reluctant one. But the letter’s timing — and its blunt language — suggests the agency views that outreach as insufficient on its own. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, according to wire reports.
For an industry that has spent the past year courting a friendlier regulatory posture in Washington, the letter is a reminder that goodwill has limits. Mr. Morrison closed on a note of partnership, writing that the technology has the power to radically transform American roads, from reducing fatalities to helping disabled Americans get where they need to go. But the message underneath the letter’s diplomatic close was unambiguous: the agency expects fixes, and it expects them soon.