July 9, 2026 - NHTSA Wants Action On AVs and First Responders

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 9, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

Roadways are an incredibly complex and continuously changing environment. Despite this, humans actually do a surprisingly good job of navigating through that environment. While 40,000 fatalities a year in the U.S. is still far too many, the fact that we drive 3.2 trillion miles a year and only have 1.26 fatalities for every 100 million miles driven is a sign of humans' ability to adapt to that ever-changing environment. 

Even after two decades of development, automated vehicles are still struggling with a lot of basics, like not passing school buses and responding properly to emergency first responders. AVs, particularly the robotaxis that are operating in an increasing number of cities, are interacting with first responders at an increasing rate and causing more problems in the process. It's not clear at this stage if the vehicles are getting worse at how they respond. But as the number of AVs continues to increase, with Waymo now believed to have about 4,000 vehicles operating, these incidents will also increase. 

There have been a number of reported incidents in recent months where AVs are blocking or interfering with police, ambulances, and fire trucks. This week, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Jonathan Morrison sent a letter to all automated driving system developers and demanded action to improve the situation. Morrison plans to schedule meetings with ADS developers to hear potential solutions by the end of July. 

Companies like Waymo have conducted training programs for emergency responders on how to interact with these vehicles, but clearly, that is insufficient. Human drivers are generally good at interpreting non-verbal communications to move and can respond accordingly. AVs still struggle with this and don't provide consistent interfaces for officers to contact support. Even when they can call the support teams, it takes valuable time to get the vehicles out of the way. With the Waymo vehicles, they still have human controls and an officer, firefighter, or paramedic could potentially get in and drive it out of the way. However, vehicles like the Zoox and Tesla robotaxis have no controls. ADS developers also need to figure out how to authenticate so that only authorized personnel could get the vehicles moving while others would not be able to interfere. 

This is both a technical and an operational challenge that must be resolved before we continue expanding the deployment of AVs. 

Thanks for listening.