NHTSA convenes Waymo, Zoox and Aurora for AV forum in DC

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced it will host a national autonomous vehicle safety forum on 10 March in Washington, featuring executive roundtables with Waymo’s Tekedra Mawakana, Zoox’s Aicha Evans, and Aurora’s Chris Urmson. The day-long session—which notably lacks any major presence from Tesla—will address safety performance metrics, remote assistance regulation, and potential new federal guidance.

NHTSA has not delivered a substantive update to its autonomous driving guidelines since posting its 2017 framework. Administrator Jonathan Morrison has framed the forum as a measured effort to bring major players onboard as the agency overhauls its policy. Among the items on the agenda: removing unnecessary deployment barriers and improving safety oversight. 

The agency has simultaneously opened investigations into Waymo robotaxis allegedly passing stopped school buses, signalling that regulatory acceleration does not mean relaxed scrutiny. Additional investigations into less established autonomy players like Tesla are also underway.

Despite having no presence during the mainstage sessions or a featured speaker at the event, Tesla is listed as having an outdoor showcase at the venue. The distinction likely is not incidental: Tesla’s sole US robotaxi service in Austin operates under Texas’s permissive state framework. The automaker is also distinguished for logging effectively zero autonomous test miles in California over six consecutive years, and having no permits to conduct driverless testing operations in the state. It notably redacts crash narratives from its NHTSA filings—a practice unique among commercial autonomous vehicle operators.

Tesla’s exclusion from the panel is likely a regulatory verdict as much as it is a logistical one. The companies whose executives are scheduled to speak at the forum are also those operating under Standing General Order reporting obligations to NHTSA. Tesla has actively resisted the documentation standards that would place it in that category, and thus it is unsurprisingly relegated to doing live demonstrations in the lot outside.

The three indoor participants all represent meaningfully different approaches to commercialised autonomous driving. Waymo—arguably the most prominent and well-established—currently operates more than 3,000 units across six US cities, has logged 200 million fully autonomous miles, and completes 400,000 weekly rides. It uses a generalised driving stack, the Waymo Driver, which is designed to work across vehicle platforms. The vehicles it uses are modified versions of existing passenger vehicles, most prominently the Jaguar I-Pace.

Aurora focuses on heavy-duty trucking, and is distinguished for deploying the US’ first commercial driverless freight service on Texas highways via a Driver-as-a-Service model. It counts Volvo and Paccar as OEM partners. Amazon-backed Zoox, on the other hand, is deploying a purpose-built bidirectional pod designed exclusively for dense urban ride-hailing, with integration into the Amazon Prime ecosystem as a longer-term objective. The pod has no steering wheel or any other controls, and therefore faces steeper regulatory hurdles to deployment than its counterparts. 

The forum’s agenda will target the questions that will define the next phase of US robotaxi regulation. The safety metrics panel will examine leading indicators—for example, behavioural data and safety margin violations—rather than lagging crash statistics, with academic critic Phil Koopman among the featured panellists. The remote assistance session could prove particularly consequential: rules on latency thresholds, operator certification, and cybersecurity requirements will affect every commercial operator, including Tesla, which has acknowledged using teleoperation in Austin to an unquantified degree.

The process does not end on 10 March. A public comment period runs until 10 April, and whatever guidance emerges will set the terms for nationwide commercial robotaxi deployment. Congress is simultaneously considering legislation to ease autonomous vehicle deployment without human controls, giving the forum a broader legislative audience.