Automated Commercial Motor Vehicle Inspection Demonstrations and Evaluations [Technology Brief]

NHTSA · 2025 · ROSA P / United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

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Summary

This technology brief from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) addresses the operational gap regarding how Automated Driving System (ADS)-equipped Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMVs) interact with roadside inspection stations and law enforcement. Current inspection procedures rely on visual cues, such as signage and emergency lights, to instruct human drivers to pull over or bypass stations. However, no existing mechanisms allow driverless ADS-equipped CMVs to receive or respond to these instructions. As part of the FMCSA’s Automated Commercial Motor Vehicle Evaluation (ACE) program, this project aimed to develop and test methods for efficient communication between ADS-equipped CMVs, inspection personnel, and law enforcement, serving as a proof-of-concept for integrating with existing weigh station bypass infrastructure. The study began with a literature review to assess state-of-the-art capabilities and requirements for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The team developed a Concept of Operations detailing six operational test scenarios, including electronic confirmation of ADS health, enhanced pre-trip inspection data transfer, weigh station bypass compliance, populating roadside inspection applications, and responding to emergency lights. Testing utilized FMCSA’s ACE Program CMV, a reference vehicle capable of fully automated driving under specific conditions. The vehicle’s software was modified to support these use cases and powered by the Federal Highway Administration’s CARMA software, originally designed for light-duty vehicles. Experiments were conducted on a closed 1.8-mile test track to evaluate the vehicle’s ability to follow inspection and law enforcement instructions using wireless messaging and sensor data. The findings demonstrated that ADS-equipped CMVs can successfully communicate with inspection entities via wireless messaging. The project proved that the test vehicle could integrate with existing commercial weigh station bypass software and hardware, exchanging information in real-time through mobile bypass units and provider servers using cellular and radio frequency identification (RFID) communications. Specifically, data exchange between the vehicle, bypass unit, and server occurred in 2.65 seconds. Additionally, the ADS-equipped CMV successfully detected and automatically responded to active emergency lights from law enforcement vehicles. The study also established the foundation for transmitting ADS-related safety data messages into FMCSA’s new inspection platform, SafeSpect, and resulted in enhancements to CARMA software to better accommodate the handling characteristics of CMVs. The significance of this work lies in establishing the first steps toward understanding and facilitating interactions between ADS-equipped CMVs and roadside infrastructure. The results indicate that while technical integration is feasible, procedural, software, and hardware changes are necessary to support future widespread adoption. The authors conclude that consistent, well-defined requirements for communication standards and vehicular performance are essential to enable safe and efficient inspections for automated commercial vehicles. This project provides critical lessons learned for future ACE testing and highlights the need for more complex data transfer interactions to bridge the gap between automated vehicles and existing roadside systems.

Key finding

ADS-equipped commercial motor vehicles can successfully communicate health status and inspection data via wireless messaging and automatically respond to law enforcement emergency lights using existing weigh station bypass infrastructure.

Methodology

field_study

Sample size: 1

Provenance

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• v2x connected vehicle