The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) earlier this year sent to the Office of Management and Budget a Notice of Proposed Rule Making regarding vehicle-to-vehicle communication.

Mark Rosekind, NHTSA Administrator. Such V2V networking allows a car to "look ahead" through an intersection, and around corners. The capability could reduce the more than 36,000 lives lost in the U.S. to crashes in 2014 by about 14,000, the agency said.

In a recent forum held at MIT on issues affecting autonomous driving, Mark Rosekind, NHTSA administrator, said it will take factors beyond technology to realize autonomous vehicle operation. While technology developments for autonomous vehicles are falling into place, he said that successful adoption will require that drivers be educated on what those systems can do and how to interface with them. For example, operators today may not realize that their vehicles have automatic braking until an incident activates it. He said that is similar to drivers not knowing how to brake with ABS systems, even though those systems have been available for three decades.

Rosekind said over the next six months NHTSA plans to "deploy significant technologies" focused on human choices, part of which will borrow educational methods that have proven successful from areas such as public health and marketing. Also needed are tools to evaluate how distraction, lack of sleep or drug interactions, among other factors, affect accident rates.

Rosekind said that controls and audio and visual cues provided to operators need more standardization among brands. He cited driver confusion when renting or borrowing cars as to control location and what various sounds mean.