“As of today, October 2026, there are no federal motor vehicle safety standards that govern any of the assisted or automated driving technologies. Nothing at all.”

This Week in Tech · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

Context

Abuelsamid had described GM's plan for unsupervised hands-off, eyes-off highway driving, and the host asked who signs off on such systems. He explains that federal regulators set vehicle safety standards and states license drivers; some states, including Michigan, treat an active automated system as the driver and make its manufacturer liable.

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Transcript

This Week in Tech Around 1:00:41 into the episode

Sam Abuelsamid

…supervise it and pay attention and be ready to take over at any second. The GM system is designed to be unsupervised. And if the driver doesn't take control when it asks you to, then it will just safely carry on and bring the vehicle over to a safe stop when it reaches the limits of what it can do.

Mikah Sargent

Now, when you talk about those features, these are like presumably tested alongside NHTSA. They get some sort of stamp of approval. Who says, hey, that's totally okay if you do unsupervised

Sam Abuelsamid

so the funny thing about NHTSA, which is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, they write the federal motor vehicle safety standards. As of today, October 2026, there are no federal motor vehicle safety standards that govern any of the assisted or automated driving technologies. Nothing at all. You want to say that? Yeah. So as far as the feds are concerned, they've been investigating some of the stuff that Tesla and others are doing, but there are no actual rules that govern this. So at a state level, it's a little bit different. Because the way regulations are set up in the U.S. is the federal government's responsible for setting the safety standards for the vehicles themselves. So…

Mikah Sargent

in Portland now, but I see. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I did see, I saw some robo-taxis back when I was there. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid

So the Zeus robotais. Our city's been

Glenn Fleishman

fighting it, as I recall. I don't know.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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