Senate Hearing Accelerates Push for Federal AV Rules as Waymo and Tesla Defend Safety Records

A Senate Commerce Committee hearing served as a high-stakes audit of autonomous vehicle safety, with leaders from Tesla and Waymo arguing their systems produce net safety gains while facing mounting regulatory scrutiny. Lawmakers from both parties signaled a need for consistent national rules to replace the patchwork of state policies that now govern self-driving deployments. The hearing came on the heels of a Jan. 23 incident in Santa Monica in which a Waymo vehicle made contact with a child who stepped out from behind a parked car; the child suffered minor injuries, the vehicle executed an emergency deceleration and remained at the curb until responders cleared the scene, and the episode prompted an NHTSA review. Senators also pressed Waymo on multiple reported episodes of vehicles failing to yield to stopped school buses; the company said it has pushed software updates in response and relies on broad operational datasets to validate safety claims. Waymo defended those claims with company-cited analyses of tens of millions of miles that it says show substantially lower serious- and pedestrian-injury collision rates than human drivers within its operating domains. Tesla’s nascent robotaxi rollout in Austin also drew scrutiny after a third-party analysis of NHTSA data suggested an elevated crash rate compared with human drivers in recent months. Lawmakers probed technical safeguards, liability frameworks, and the extent and transparency of remote assistance — human operators who intervene when a vehicle encounters scenarios it cannot resolve autonomously. Democratic proposals unveiled at the hearing would require manufacturers to disclose operational metrics — miles traveled, injury incidents, unplanned stoppages — and to clearly define the roadway and condition envelopes in which systems are certified to operate. Industry witnesses argued continuous software updates and data-driven learning cycles improve safety over time, while independent experts testified that safety is inseparable from developer practices and urged stronger oversight and trust assessments of deploying firms. The exchange exposed a policy gap: Congress currently lacks routine mechanisms to compel industry-wide reporting or to standardize operational limits even as these technologies operate in communities and interact with schools, buses and dense curbside activity. Procedural outcomes are likely to include requirements for richer datasets to be shared with federal agencies, clearer definitions of when remote assistance is permitted, and more prescriptive operational boundaries for deployments in sensitive settings like school zones. For municipalities and school districts, the hearing heightened the urgency of local coordination around testing, lighting, signage and pickup patterns to reduce risky curbside edge cases.