The old FRA standards helped prevent the massive 100+ fatality collisions of the previous era. What European standards focus on is crash prevention as their train cars will more or less get wiped when they do collide ( look at the bad aibling, Santiago derailment, and the one in Italy where couple compartments got literally obliterated; all of these are post 2010).

What the new FRA standards are is basically allowing for more off the shelf equipment but they still need to be modified for the Tier I alternate crash worthiness. What the new standards do have is that at tier III (mostly for speeds on California’s new hsr network) they basically don’t need the brute force standards due to anything made to survive that at those speeds will basically be a high speed bank vault and even then when it collides it’ll probably take flight and make a crater on whatever it lands on.

The Siemens cars will probably win due to the RFP needing a cab car, with Siemens being the standard car for short/medium haul corridors while viewliners become the long distance ones. The RFP is open to multiple units so other companies might jump in with higher speed multiple units.

On another note, can’t wait to see the new multilevel power cars for NJT.