Enlarge / Highway viewed from the motor vehicle. (credit: Getty Images | chombosan)

On Monday, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency published its long-awaited Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. NHTSA is the part of the US Government responsible for regulating the vehicles we drive, and it’s broadly in favor of self-driving technology given the potential to reduce the death toll on the nation’s roads. That toll, by the way, nudged above 35,000 in 2015 (up almost eight percent on the previous year).

The new document includes both a performance guidance (as opposed to regulation) for automated vehicles as well as a model policy for individual states to follow. As is the case with new federal government policies, the document is open for public comment for the next 60 days.

What does the guidance say?

First off the bat is NHTSA’s decision to abandon its own scale of autonomous driving levels. Instead, the agency will use the SAE scale; this goes from Level 0 (where a human driver does everything) to level 5 (completely automated). Cars equipped with adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, traffic jam assist, or Autopilot fall somewhere between SAE’s Levels 2 and 3: