Purpose-built robotaxis reach the road through exemption, not compliance.
Because federal motor vehicle standards presume steering wheels, pedals, and mirrors, NHTSA is scaling driverless deployment through temporary — even retroactive — exemptions while a competency standard is still being written and crash liability is settled by contract and self-insurance rather than statute.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
The industry's fork runs through FMVSS exemptions rather than compliance because federal standards still presume human controls, which is the theme's exact mechanism.
Deployment proceeds while standards written for foot pedals are retroactively rewritten and the first federal competency standard is still being built — the exemption-and-rewriting pathway in action.