TakingTheHill.com: Trump Administration nixes Autonomous Vehicle Committee

From TakingTheHill.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation (ACAT) within the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has been terminated.

The Obama-era committee met once in January 2017 prior to President Trump’s inauguration and was inactive in 2018.

Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) database, the DOT recommended that the committee be terminated and that “based on USDOT’s development and publication of AV 3.0 policies and principles, active stakeholder engagement is already underway. Therefore, the USDOT does have the ability to obtain broad stakeholders’ feedback on AV matters outside of the committee.”

First established in 2016, the committee was comprised of 25 members, including executives from GM and Waymo, professors, and politicians involved within the transportation industry.

The committee was created to “provide information, advice, and recommendations to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation on matters relating to the development and deployment of automated transportation systems and assess the state of departmental research, policy and regulatory support within this framework,” according to the DOT’s webpage.

To view the Committee Detail, click here.