Federal highway grants now require vehicle tracking and crash prediction data.

What it does

This bill amends federal highway safety grant programs to allow states and localities to use federal money for predictive data analytics, telematics (vehicle tracking), and other advanced technologies to identify dangerous road segments and prevent crashes. It requires the Department of Transportation to issue guidance within one year on how to anonymize data, protect privacy, and ensure these tools are validated before use, and directs DOT to coordinate across agencies on deployment of these technologies.

Why we flagged it

The bill's operative mechanism is a mandate to integrate predictive analytics and telematics into federal highway safety grant programs. It is not a deregulation, carve-out, or subsidy—it is a technology integration requirement that conditions federal funding on adoption of data-driven safety tools.

What the text implies

• Telematics and predictive analytics require continuous collection of vehicle location, speed, acceleration, and driver behavior data. The bill mandates this collection as a condition of federal highway safety funding but defers privacy safeguards to future DOT guidance, not statute—creating a gap between mandate and protection.
• States and localities receiving federal highway safety grants will be required to adopt these technologies, effectively making telematics deployment a condition of federal funding. This may accelerate data collection infrastructure in rural and underserved areas without explicit local consent.

The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.

Who stands to gain

telematics and vehicle-tracking technology vendors; predictive analytics software companies; data aggregation and risk-modeling firms