Starting with 2030 models, new passenger vehicles and light trucks in the United States will have to be equipped with pedestrian-sensitive automatic emergency braking. NHTSA’s final rule sets forth Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard № 127, which requires AEB on new passenger cars and light trucks by September 2029.
NHTSA forecasts that FMVSS 127 will reduce rear-end and pedestrian crashes; they say it will prevent at least 360 deaths and 24,000 injuries annually. The standard requires AEB systems to effectively detect a pedestrian both in daylight and after dark.
Sophie Shulman, the agency’s Deputy Administrator, says, “Automatic emergency braking is proven to save lives and reduce serious injuries from frontal crashes, and this technology is now mature enough to require it in all new cars and light trucks. In fact, this technology is now so advanced that we’re requiring these systems to be even more effective at higher speeds and to detect pedestrians. Most new vehicles already come with AEB, and we expect that many cars and light trucks will be able to meet this standard ahead of the deadline, meaning even more lives will be saved thanks to this technology”.
FMVSS 127 requires vehicles be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them up to 100 km/h, and to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. The AEB system must also apply the brakes automatically at speeds of up to 144 km/h when a collision with a lead vehicle is imminent, and up to 72 km/h when a pedestrian is detected.
The standard fulfills a provision in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2022 to establish minimum performance standards requiring that all passenger vehicles be equipped with AEB. This standard also advances the Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy, launched in January 2022 to address the national crisis in traffic fatalities and serious injuries.
This final rule applies to all vehicles with a gross weight rating of up to 10,000 pounds—nearly all U.S. light vehicles.
DVN comment
The main advantage of lidar is that data generated by the sensor represent its surroundings with high precision in terms of distance to the objects. Cameras estimate the distance to the object after a segmentation of images. In night conditions, the detection of pedestrian will depend on luminance contrast between the pedestrian and their immediate environment, especially when headlamps don’t adequately illuminate the scene. This is one of the reasons why camera-based AEB fails when a pedestrian is on the vehicle’s trajectory. It also further erodes the already-critically-thin-ice on which one—and only one—automaker CEO is standing on when he says lidar is “doomed”, calls it a technology “for losers”, and claims he can do everything better with just cameras.