Bloomberg News
President Donald Trump intends to nominate Heidi King to lead the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, selecting the agency’s acting chief to grapple with driverless-car technologies and a massive recall of air bags that risk exploding.
The White House announced Trump’s plans late Thursday. King has been the Transportation Department agency’s deputy administrator since late fall. The NHTSA has been without a permanent administrator since Mark Rosekind departed just before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. King’s appointment would be subject to Senate confirmation.
King, a former General Electric Co. GE, +1.13% executive and House Energy and Commerce Committee economist, would take the reins at an agency scrambling to respond to rapidly emerging self-driving car systems and traditional vehicle defects that have spawned record industrywide recalls in recent years.
King dispatched investigators in March to examine two separate fatal crashes linked to automated-driving technologies. On March 18, a pedestrian was struck and killed by an Uber Technologies Inc. self-driving car with a safety operator at the wheel in Arizona. A driver of a Tesla Inc. TSLA, +6.54% electric vehicle with its semiautonomous Autopilot system activated died March 23 when his sport utility crashed into a barrier near Mountain View, Calif.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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