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Industry panel urges wider autonomous-vehicle deployment, lawmakers press safety, jobs and liability questions
Summary
An industry panel told a legislative interim committee that autonomous vehicles (AVs) can cut crashes and create higher-paying jobs, citing company data and federal reporting rules. Lawmakers pushed back on claims about safety percentages, sensor reliability, insurance impacts and local workforce effects.
Robert Singleton of the Chamber of Progress, Bart Teeter of BOT Auto and Jeff Farah of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association testified to a legislative interim committee in Ruidoso that autonomous vehicles offer safety, economic development, sustainability and equity benefits.
"They don't drink, they don't get distracted, they don't have conversations with the people in the cars while they're going on," Robert Singleton said while describing the industry safety case, and he cited company and market data comparing AV performance to human drivers.
Panelists pointed to large deployment and testing numbers as evidence: Jeff Farah said member companies have driven more than 145,000,000 autonomous miles on public roads (industry figure) and cited Waymo data used in industry comparisons. Bart Teeter, a former Texas Highway Patrol commercial-vehicle official and director of fleet and operational safety at BOT Auto, said AV trucks can anticipate traffic better than human drivers because of diverse sensor arrays and redundancy.
Lawmakers pressed the panel on several points. Representative Catherine Brown asked whether the freight AVs are electric; Teeter replied that most current freight AVs are diesel retrofits of conventional tractors and that fully autonomy‑ready trucks from original equipment manufacturers are only beginning to roll off production lines. On sensor degradation and fallback behavior, industry witnesses described redundancy, remote intervention and a statutory "minimal risk condition" that requires vehicles to pull to a safe stop when perception is lost.
Committee members also questioned the statistical presentation of safety benefits. Representative Brown noted the percentage reductions for specific crash types were sometimes based on small raw counts, and industry witnesses acknowledged the underlying data mixes company-reported market samples (for example, Waymo trips in several metropolitan areas) and urged cautious interpretation.
On liability and insurance, the panel said the long-term expectation is that higher safety performance could reduce premiums but acknowledged uncertainty and that the insurance market is still adapting. Jeff Farah said federal reporting (NHTSA standing general order) makes AV incident information more readily available than analogous human-driver data, which shapes industry and regulator understanding.
The panel asked the committee for continued state–industry collaboration on first-responder training, robust state statutes and public education around AVs. Several legislators requested follow-up materials and demonstration video links to inform future deliberations.
The committee did not take any formal votes on policy during the session; the panel concluded its remarks and answered questions before the hearing moved to other agenda items.
