Half a dozen Democratic senators and a leading traffic safety nonprofit group are calling for federal regulators to train a more discerning eye on automated vehicles.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety this week challenged the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to abandon what it calls a “hands-off” approach to the technology.

The NHTSA is an agency of the federal transportation department tasked with developing and enforcing vehicle safety standards, among other duties. The IIHS says the regulator should use its power to determine the safety of autonomous vehicles to prevent dangerous traffic dynamics.

It pointed out that six senators sent a letter to the NHTSA last month that called for the same action. The letters highlights recent crashes involving vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems and decried the agency’s reaction to the accidents, rather than preventative action.

“We urge NHTSA to use its existing regulatory authorities to ensure vehicles equipped with partially automated driving systems and ADS are safe for all road users,” the letter says in part. “We cannot allow partially automated driving systems and ADS to accelerate the road safety crisis. NHTSA must take firm control of the wheel and steer manufacturers towards prioritizing safety.”

Meanwhile, IIHS, in a post written by Senior Research Scientist David Kidd, says neither the driving public nor traffic safety advocates like it know if automatic driving technology is safe, whether in individual passenger cars or robotaxis.

“Federal regulators have struggled to stay ahead of the risks that come with innovations. Commonsense guardrails are missing, and a lack of crash-reporting requirements have left researchers like me without the robust data we need to evaluate the safety of these systems,” Kidd wrote.

The technology, which has been hailed as having the potential to make roads safer by eliminating human error, hasn’t been proven to do so and can actually present additional risks, he said.

“Unfortunately, by not requiring complete data about crashes involving automation, NHTSA has made it harder to reduce these risks,” wrote Kidd, who said drivers sometimes misuse the systems. He said the IIHS, has stepped in as a “de facto regulator” of the technology with a ratings program aimed at encouraging automakers to add safeguards.

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