A global initiative ensuring that animal welfare is integrated into the safety standards of self-driving vehicles.
Photo: Chinmayisk, CC BY-SA 3.0
As self-driving vehicles begin to navigate our physical world, we must ensure they protect all road users. We advocate for a multi-stakeholder approach to self-driving vehicle safety that accounts for every being on the road, including the companion animals in our homes and the wildlife in our ecosystems.
The scale of animal mortality on U.S. roads is staggering. An estimated 1–2 million crashes with large animals are reported every year, but this captures only a fraction of the toll. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that 89 to 340 million birds alone die annually in vehicle collisions, with total small-animal roadkill plausibly reaching into the hundreds of millions.
Animal road users are missing from the definitions and safety requirements that govern self-driving vehicles — in the United States and at the United Nations. Three open regulatory windows let us fix that.
The draft GTR's Annex 5 lists animals as objects ADS should expect to encounter, but the definition of “other road user” in Section 2.21 does not explicitly include them — leaving animal safety obligations ambiguous.
We propose a one-line clarification to Section 2.21 to restore consistency with NHTSA's established position on animal safety.
The House framework for self-driving vehicles preempts state safety standards in favor of federal authority but does not name animal road users in its safety competencies or testing protocols.
The Senate's companion framework for federal self-driving vehicle regulation. The 2017 version (S. 1885) listed "animals" as a named sensing requirement; the bill stalled in 2018 and a new draft is being prepared, but its text has not been released.
Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, effective with the Lisbon Treaty, requires that in formulating and implementing policies on transport, research, and technological development, the EU and its Member States must pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals as sentient beings. The EU's Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI Models further lists “non-human welfare” among the risks providers must address in systemic risk identification.
NHTSA's Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety recognized animal detection as an expected function of ADS, listing “animals” among the objects these systems should be designed to perceive and respond to safely. This established a baseline expectation that ADS account for animal safety on U.S. roads.
The American Vision for Safer Transportation through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies (AV START) Act, S. 1885 in the 115th Congress, was the Senate's companion to the SELF DRIVE Act. Its safety evaluation requirements listed “animals” alongside motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians as a named sensing requirement. The bill cleared committee but stalled in 2018; Senators Peters and Thune are preparing a new version whose text has not yet been released.
The Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution (SELF DRIVE) Act has been introduced in successive Congresses as the House framework for federal regulation of self-driving vehicles. The current draft, H.R. 7390 (2026), defines “vulnerable road user” as human individuals only; its named ADS competencies do not extend to animals, and animal collisions are not a separately reportable field in the bill's crash-reporting scheme.
Germany's Autonomous Driving Act (StVG, 2021) established a legal framework for Level 4 ADS on public roads and named animals in its liability provisions (§17(4)) alongside vehicle holders and drivers. The implementing ordinance (AFGBV, 2022, §3(8)) goes further, requiring vehicles with autonomous driving functions to detect animals in their environment, perform a risk assessment, predict their behavior, and execute avoidance maneuvers — the only binding statutory animal-detection mandate in any jurisdiction.
The UN Working Party on Automated/Autonomous and Connected Vehicles (GRVA) has adopted a draft Global Technical Regulation for ADS. While the draft's Annex 5 lists animals as objects ADS should expect to encounter, the core definition of “other road user” in Section 2.21 does not explicitly include them — leaving animal safety obligations ambiguous.
Across the major frameworks shaping self-driving vehicle regulation, animals are treated inconsistently. The current SELF DRIVE Act draft (H.R. 7390) and the UN GTR's draft definition of “other road user” both leave animals out, and the next AV START draft is not yet public. None of these frameworks currently extends “vulnerable road user” or its equivalents to include animals — out of step with NHTSA's own guidance, EU treaty obligations, and binding German law. The fix is the same in each case: name animals in the definition of road users so that existing safety obligations clearly extend to all of them.
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