The historical roles of drivers, vehicle manufacturers, federal and state regulators, and law enforcement agencies in automotive safety is well understood. However, the increasing deployment of driving automation technologies to support various comfort, convenience, efficiency, productivity, mobility, and possibly safety features has the potential to alter this understanding. In order to facilitate clarity in discussing the topic of driving automation with other stakeholders and to clarify the level(s) of automation on which the agency is currently focusing its efforts, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a Preliminary Statement of Policy (SOP) concerning Automated Vehicles that included its automation levels.

In this paper, we present key factors for consideration in each automation level which are based upon SAE J3016. These factors focus on adding more specificity with regard to the distribution of the driving tasks between the driver and the automation system. The result of this effort has led to a refinement of our understanding of the automation levels based on the nature of the vehicle control aspect provided by the feature, the nature of the environmental sensing and response, the fallback strategy employed, and the feature’s scope of operation.