Ah, I see the problem:

"A member of the Society of Automotive Historians, Jamie Lincoln Kitman drives a 1966 Lancia Fulvia and a 1969 Ford Lotus-Cortina, both of which run fine on unleaded."

He just wants to drive his crappy, unsafe, polluting cars around forever and make us do the same.

This is not the first time I have heard similar arguments from "car people" and I don't understand why any classic car collectors would be against self-driving cars (well, rhetorically I do not, I understand that a lot of classic car people tend to be sentimental curmudgeons with a lack of basic reasoning faculties).

The #1 danger to classic cars is collisions with distracted drivers of newer, less cool cars. A friend of mine lost a late 1960s Honda CVCC (precursor to Civic) in a front-end collision after putting a lot of work swapping over a bunch of period-correct NOS modifications from another late 1960s Honda CVCC that he obtained as a wreck from another collector who wanted to sell it as a parts car to a fellow enthusiast after it had been involved in a similar front-end collision. Two classic cars lost to distracted drivers of modern shitboxes who were too busy texting to realize that they should not have been making a left-hand turn.

Even California exempts pre-1975 cars from smog testing (and soon to be pre-1980s cars). Classic cars will have no trouble being grandfathered in. I have seen people drive Model Ts around on the streets.