The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is weighing whether to implement the rules that were recently implemented on millions of older vehicles. The rule requires electric and hybrid vehicles to have noise makers to alert pedestrians.
Passed in 2018, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 141 requires EV and hybrid passenger cars manufactured on or after March 1, 2021, to emit a sound at speeds below 19 mph to alert pedestrians to their presence. This vehicle was considered too quiet were it not for the lack of engine noise.
2014 Mercedes-Benz B-Class Electric Drive
In July 2022, NHTSA received a petition (first spotted by Teslarati) requesting that FMVSS 141 be implemented on all electric and hybrid vehicles on US roads. Submitted by Sidney Firstman, of Highwood, Illinois, the petition argues that the March 2021 implementation date is arbitrary, that vehicles built before that date pose the same risk to pedestrians, and therefore the lack of noisemakers on all EVs and hybrids. the older one is a safety flaw.
NHTSA has since begun an investigation into the claims involving vehicles built as early as the late 1990s. The oldest vehicle listed is a General Motors EV1 from 1997, though given the retirement or destruction of most of its fleet, that wouldn’t have much of an impact on the real world. Overall, the investigation listed 938 related products, totaling 9.1 million individual vehicles.
1996 General Motors EV1
It’s not clear how the investigation will go, but it should be noted that there is a large gap between the passage of the noise maker rules and their implementation. The rules were passed in 2010 but weren’t finalized until 2018. The automaker was then granted several extensions to implementation deadlines, the last coming in 2020. The NHTSA also last year said no to the vote that drivers vote for these noisemakers.
It is highly unusual for the NHTSA to open an investigation from a single petition, and if seriously considered and extended back to even one of the renewal dates, this may mark some of the first automated safety.
