The Alliance for Automotive Innovation (Auto Innovators) has taken its disagreement with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) new automatic emergency braking rule to court.

The association clarified in a press release on Friday that it isn’t against the use and widespread implementation of AEB nor does it lack confidence in the technology; in fact, the release states AEB is “a game-changing safety technology.” However, Auto Innovators argues that the rule isn’t technologically feasible.

NHTSA’s Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, FMVSS 127, which will take effect Jan. 27, will require AEB and pedestrian AEB to come standard by September 2029 on all passenger cars and light trucks weighing up to 10,000 pounds.

By then, AEB must stop and avoid rear-end crashes at up to 62 miles per hour and detect pedestrians in daylight and at night.

The standard will require AEB to engage at up to 90 mph when a collision with a lead vehicle is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected.

Auto Innovators filed a petition for review of the rule on Friday with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“The auto industry has invested more than a billion dollars developing AEB,” the release states. “In 2016, automakers voluntarily agreed to deploy AEB systems on all new vehicles by 2025 and have already met that commitment. This voluntary agreement came after substantial research and consultation with NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

“It is the prerogative of the incoming administration to repeal or revise the Biden administration’s Department of Transportation AEB rule,” the release states. “The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety indicated it ‘… expects [the] voluntary [AEB] commitment to prevent 42,000 crashes and 20,000 injuries by 2025.'”

A timeline of the rule implementation and Auto Innovators’ actions regarding it was provided in the release:

• • May 31, 2023 — NHTSA proposed AEB rulemaking for new vehicles.
  • Aug. 14, 2023 — Auto Innovators submitted comments to NHTSA on its AEB proposal.
  • April 29, 2024 — NHTSA finalized its AEB rule with a no-contact requirement.
  • June 24, 2024 — Auto Innovators filed a petition with NHTSA asking it to reconsider the April 29, 2024 rule citing the “impracticability” of NHTSA’s no-contact requirement “including the likelihood that this requirement will lead to unsafe unintended consequences…”
  • Nov. 12, 2024 — In a post-election letter to President-elect Donald Trump, Auto Innovators wrote that the 2024 AEB rule is “inconsistent with regulations implemented in other parts of the world and urges the incoming administration to ‘re-open the AEB rule…'”
  • Nov. 25, 2024 — NHTSA “effectively denied” the association’s June 24, 2024 petition for reconsideration and the no-contact requirement.

John Bozzella, Auto Innovators president and CEO, called that action “a disastrous decision by the nation’s top traffic safety regulator that will endlessly —and unnecessarily — frustrate drivers; will make vehicles more expensive; and at the end of the day… won’t really improve driver or pedestrian safety.”

In a June 2024 letter to Congress, Bozzella wrote NHTSA’s new standard is “practically impossible with available technology” and that “NHTSA’s own data shows only one tested vehicle met the stopping distance requirements in the final rule.”

“We recommended NHTSA adopt a standard already in place in Europe that detects a potential forward collision, provides a driver warning and automatically engages the braking system to avoid a collision — or mitigate its severity — through the use of existing crashworthiness systems designed to better protect road users,” Bozzella wrote.

“Automakers and suppliers provided NHTSA [with] a series of technical adjustments during the comment period to correct the deficiencies and achieve our shared safety goals. Despite partnering with automakers on AEB in 2016, this time the agency rejected the industry’s feedback. …after a decade of shared and substantive work on AEB and a billion dollars invested, NHTSA inexplicably changed course and issued a rule that automakers indicated was not feasible with widely used braking technologies.”

According to Auto Innovators, USDOT has 40 days to submit the administrative record to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then the court will set a briefing schedule.

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