U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx

North American International Auto Show

Detroit, MI

Hi everyone, thank you for joining us here today.     

It’s good to be in Detroit and it’s really good to be here at the auto show.

Before I start, I want to thank those who came here to stand with me today. This is an important announcement and your support is very much appreciated:

• Mark Reuss , president of General Motors North America
• Lex Kerssemakers, senior Vice President for the Americas at Volvo
• Michael Dahl, director of vehicle safety and regulatory compliance at Fiat Chrysler
• Curt Magleby Director of Governmental Affairs at Ford Motor Co. 
• John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s self-driving car project
• Diarmuid O’Connell, Vice President for business development at Tesla
• Michael Pozsar at Delphi

And of course, the NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind.

Thank you, thank you all for standing with us today.

As you know, last month, Congress passed a surface transportation bill, the FAST Act, which was a good down payment on the future of our nation’s infrastructure.  But, as the President said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, there is much more work to be done to reshape and build a 21^st century transportation system.

Even with Congress’ action late last year, the system’s future is in jeopardy.  Here at the auto show we are seeing great innovations, but if we in government don’t change our ways, drivers in the future will not be moving on our highways; they will be crawling in traffic.

As detailed in our report, Beyond Traffic, we expect the US population to increase by 70 million people in the next 30 years.  By 2045, seventy-five percent of Americans will reside in just eleven megaregions, which we all know do not have the infrastructure to accommodate this growth.

Meanwhile, we expect a forty-five percent increase in freight traffic on our roads, rails, pipelines and waterways. And that’s on top of the congestion we will have just from people trying to get to their jobs, schools, and other places.  We are on course for a future in which congestion will get worse than it already is.  On top of that, we also have to account for more frequent and extreme weather events - like Hurricane Sandy - due to climate change that are damaging our infrastructure.  

Our nation needs an approach that rises to the challenges before us, that is as good as the ambitions of American people and industry.

We have been talking about the tremendous potential benefits of technology in transportation for more than a year now, and we recognized that we had some catching up to do.

We know that 80% of car accidents are due to human error. So we ask ourselves, what happens if human error was eliminated? If the technology meets its promise, my back of the envelope math tells me that more than 25,000 lives would have been saved in 2015 alone.

That is powerful possibility, and that is not only worth pursuing, it is worth working aggressively to determine whether or not it is true.

And we know that the technology is rapidly getting better with each passing month.

Safety benefits aside, the congestion we have on our roads is a major driver of negative environmental impacts and climate change. In fact, in 2013, the transportation sector accounted for approximately 30 percent of US net greenhouse gas emissions – making it the second largest source.   

If we want to keep our economy moving and our people safe, we need to act.  If we want our transportation system to accomplish these goals with less impact on the environment, we need to act.  We’ve got to promote cleaner and better alternatives – like transportation systems that harness technology and innovation to move us in a safer, smarter and more sustainable way.

So we’ve been doing a lot of research and outreach to the leaders in the auto and tech industry – those standing with me today - to ask them what they’re working on and to figure out how government can work with them toward progress.

Last Spring I went to Delphi and I announced that we would speed up our timeline for submitting a proposed rule requiring vehicle to vehicle technology in all new cars sold.  We’re making progress – the proposed rule went over to OMB earlier this week.

Meeting the challenge of a transformation to a safer, smarter and more sustainable transportation system requires infrastructure that reduces congestion not by just paving new lanes, but by making better use of the lanes and capacity we have – and introducing more diverse set of choices in fast-growing communities. 

President Obama was clear in his address that we need to put more resources into transportation infrastructure and invest in our future. In the weeks ahead, I will have more to say – and the President will have more to say – about our vision for transitioning to a safer, smarter and cleaner, more sustainable transportation system for the decades ahead.

For the moment, however, I want to focus on one piece of that vision – autonomous vehicles.

And that is why I am here today.  

Automated vehicles open up possibilities for saving lives, saving time and saving fuel.  Automated vehicles promise to move people and goods more efficiently than we are moving them today.

And, when automation is combined with other technologies like electric motors and innovations coming out of the sharing economy, we will be able to reduce congestion and pollution even further.

How do we get there? The President has a bold proposal.

Today I am announcing that the President is proposing $3.9 billion over ten years to fund pilot projects that help accelerate the development and adoption of safe vehicle automation.  

The President’s proposal allows us to test automated and connected vehicle systems in different corridors and different states, and to work with industry to ensure an effective interoperability framework.

The President’s proposal, with its combination of public and private effort, is the right way to drive innovation in the transportation sector. 

Just last month my Department launched the Smart City Challenge giving medium-sized cities an incentive to embrace automation and connected vehicles as a pathway to our transportation future.  The Smart City Challenge will put resources in one city to support bold, data-driven ideas to make its system work not just today but 30 years from now. The President is proposing more funding to equip our cities and states for tomorrow’s transportation challenges, and that’s the right way to proceed.

But our Administration is not waiting for the release of the President’s full budget proposal to take action. For several weeks, I have promised new steps to support the safe integration of automated vehicles into the marketplace.  I am here to announce several of these steps that will allow automated vehicles to advance in 2016:

• Today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – NHTSA -- is releasing an updated policy statement on automated vehicles that recognizes the incredible advances in automated technology over the last few years. This policy statement commits to the following action items:
  • In the next six months, we will develop and propose model policy to help states advance to this new era of safety in a way that is consistent with each other and with nationwide policy on autonomous vehicles.
  • Also in the next six months, NHTSA will propose best-practice guidance to industry on establishing principles of safe operation for fully autonomous vehicles (this includes vehicles at Level 4 on the scale established in NHTSA’s 2013 preliminary policy statement).
• We are also planning to propose new regulatory interpretations in the coming weeks that will help automated vehicle manufacturers implement safety innovations within the scope of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.  One is example is BMW, which has developed a remote self-parking feature that did not comply with our standards. I use the past tense because I am pleased to announce today that we just recently informed BMW that their remote self-parking feature complies with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.  I am personally asking automakers to submit more regulatory interpretation requests so that we can work with your progress, not hold it back. 
• We also want to call on all manufacturers to issue requests for regulatory exemptions of current rules that could unnecessarily inhibit implementation of safety technology innovations.

Now please allow me to put this into plain English:

In 2016, we are going to do everything we can to advance safe, smart and sustainable transportation innovations. We are bullish on automated vehicles.

We are committing to a six-month timeline to offer best practice guidance and propose model state legislation.

We are taking a fresh look at current regulations to see where new interpretations can be made, and we are asking manufacturers to continue to ask us to examine our regulations. And, finally, we are asking manufacturers to request exemptions where they believe automation advances can be deployed safely.

The actions we are taking today are bringing us up to speed: The bold investment proposal outlined by the President offers us a path toward a future transportation system that reduces Greenhouse Gases, advances safety, and moves our country Beyond Traffic.

Thank you very much.