Autonomous Cars Hinder Ambulances and Firefighters: The US Raises the Alarm

In the United States, federal authorities are increasingly focused on the behavior of autonomous vehicles during emergency operations. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the agency of the Department of Transportation responsible for road safety, has sent a letter to the leading developers of autonomous driving systems asking for immediate action to address a series of issues involving the interaction of driverless vehicles with law enforcement and emergency services.

The communication, signed on July 8 by NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison, recognizes the potential of autonomous driving in reducing human error-related accidents and improving road safety. However, it also highlights what is being termed a clear trend of autonomous vehicles interfering with police, firefighter, and medical personnel operations during interventions.

According to the federal agency, several cases have been documented in which autonomous vehicles have arrived at active emergency scenes, obstructed the passage of ambulances and fire trucks, or failed to recognize key elements of temporary signage such as flashing lights, smoke, fires, road cones, and other devices used to delineate operational areas. For the NHTSA, this behavior represents a functional deficiency of the system and cannot be considered an edge case since emergency situations are part of the scenarios that an autonomous vehicle must be able to safely navigate.

In the letter, Morrison emphasizes how every second is crucial when police officers, firefighters, or paramedics are responding to an emergency call. A vehicle unable to interact properly with first responders, asserts the agency head, poses a potential danger to the community.

This warning comes after a series of incidents that have particularly involved Waymo's robotaxis, but it generally concerns the entire autonomous driving sector, including companies like Zoox. Over the past year, Waymo has been subjected to several technical recalls related, among other things, to the vehicles' ability to avoid temporarily closed roads.

Among the cited incidents is a Waymo robotaxi that, at the end of last year, crossed an area affected by a police stop in Los Angeles, ignoring repeated instructions from officers, and a more recent case in Texas, where a Dallas County sheriff's deputy had to manually move a Waymo vehicle that was blocking the passage of rescuers heading to the site of an explosion in a residential complex.

For this reason, the NHTSA has announced it will start meetings with autonomous driving system developers by the end of the month. The goal is to gather the technical solutions that companies plan to adopt to improve the recognition and management of emergency scenarios, stressing that these interventions should become a priority in driving software development.