The U.S. Department of Transportation published America Leads: DOT's National Strategy for Automated Vehicles on Sept. 3, 2026, setting a department-wide agenda for fiscal years 2026 through 2030, though it is not itself a binding rule. It frames the federal government's priorities for self-driving vehicles through the end of the decade.
The strategy organizes the department's work around four goals: prioritize safety, provide regulatory certainty, promote American innovation and facilitate interoperable corridors. Where the department's earlier policy and guidance on automated vehicles conflict with the new strategy, America Leads takes precedence.
The department says automated vehicles are designed to work with roads and communications systems as they are available today, and will not rely on smart road equipment run by others, or on wireless links between vehicles and everything around them, for safety-critical functions. It does not expect the owners and operators of roads and other infrastructure to make investments just for self-driving vehicles as a condition of deploying them, in the foreseeable future.
Separately, NHTSA published a notice in the Federal Register on July 31, 2026, saying it intends to issue comprehensive updated guidance on developing and deploying automated driving systems safely, the first update since its ADS 2.0 guidance in 2017. It will post draft chapters to an open public docket for comment through July 31, 2027, on topics such as how vehicles interact with emergency responders, safety management systems, remote assistance and how vehicles behave after a crash.
According to trade press reports on the strategy, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is developing changes to its safety regulations for commercial vehicles equipped with automated driving systems. The same reports say NHTSA is preparing an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, an early step toward a rule, on objective performance standards for how competently automated driving systems drive, alongside modernizing the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and streamlining exemptions.
It is not yet clear how quickly those planned rules and the chapter-by-chapter guidance will become usable, how far federal work on corridors and shared data will ease differences from state to state, or whether voluntary guidance plus existing oversight of defects and crashes will prove enough while competency standards are still at an early stage.