23 U.S.C. § 403 — Highway safety research and development

(a) Defined Term In this section, "Federal laboratory" means either a lab the government owns and runs itself, or one the government owns but a contractor runs. (b) General Authority The Secretary may research and develop highway and motor vehicle safety, including demonstration projects, training, education, and data collection, covering: vehicle, highway, driver, passenger, motorcyclist, bicyclist, and pedestrian safety; crash causes and investigations; communications; and emergency medical services (including transporting injured people). This also covers human behavior — like driver education, impaired driving, and distracted driving — evaluating safety countermeasures (including occupant protection and drug- or alcohol-impairment technology), developing tools to detect drug-impaired drivers, researching best practices for driver education and licensing systems, and studying how state laws affect all of this. The Secretary can do this work alone, in partnership with other federal agencies and labs, through contracts or grants to the National Academy of Sciences, federal labs, state or local agencies, or other qualifying organizations and people. (c) Collaborative Research and Development To encourage new safety solutions and get private industry to develop and market new safety technology, the Secretary may share the cost of joint research projects with non-federal groups (states, local governments, foreign governments, colleges, businesses, and others) and with federal labs. These joint projects use cooperative research and development agreements, and the Secretary's share of project costs cannot exceed 50%. Any resulting technology, including licensing and royalties, follows the rules of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980. (d) Title to Equipment The Secretary may give ownership of equipment bought for demonstration projects to state or local agencies, on whatever terms the Secretary thinks are appropriate, in support of the purposes in section 402. (e) Prohibition on Certain Disclosures Any report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), or its staff or contractors, about a highway crash or crash investigation, can only be released to the public in a way that does not identify individual people. (f) Cooperative Research and Evaluation Each year, $3,500,000 of the money that would otherwise go to states for highway safety programs is instead set aside for the Secretary — acting through NHTSA's Administrator — to run a research and evaluation program on priority highway safety measures. NHTSA runs this program, jointly with the Governors Highway Safety Association. (g) International Cooperation NHTSA's Administrator may take part in international activities that improve highway safety. (h) In-vehicle Alcohol Detection Device Research "Alcohol-impaired driving" means driving with a blood alcohol level at or above the legal limit, which itself means 0.08% or whatever other percentage federal, state, or local law sets. NHTSA's Administrator must run collaborative research on in-vehicle technology to prevent alcohol-impaired driving, spending no more than $45,000,000 total for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. The Administrator may not create requirements for any device sold in retail cars that records a driver's blood alcohol level. The Administrator must send Congress an annual report on this research's progress and how the money was used. (i) Limitation on Drug and Alcohol Survey Data The Secretary must make sure anyone taking part in a program that collects drug or alcohol use data on drivers is told that taking part is voluntary. (j) Federal Share The federal government may pay up to 100% of the cost of any project under this section. (k) Child Safety Campaign The Secretary must run an education campaign to reduce children dying of heatstroke after being left in vehicles, and may use program funds for advertising and online outreach, coordinating with states, local governments, private industry, and other interested parties. (l) Development of State Processes for Informing Consumers of Recalls Within two years, the Secretary must create a grant program to help states tell vehicle owners and lessees about open recalls when they register their vehicles. To qualify for a grant, a state must apply and agree to notify owners of open recalls at registration and give them recall information for free. In picking grant recipients, the Secretary considers how well a state identifies open recalls, informs people about them, and measures its own performance. Grants run for a two-year performance period, after which states must report on how many recalls got fixed. The Paperwork Reduction Act doesn't apply to information collected this way. The Secretary must spend $1,500,000 each year from fiscal year 2022 through 2026 on this program, and may shift unused money to other activities under this section before the fiscal year ends. The Secretary does not have to issue regulations to run this program. (m) Innovative Highway Safety Countermeasures The Secretary must study how well new behavioral traffic-safety measures work — other than traffic enforcement — that seem promising, in order to improve a specific safety-countermeasure guide document for state highway safety offices. This research counts in addition to, not instead of, all the other research already required under this section.