Preemption legislation seems a little premature, to me. Sure, it would stop states from hindering autonomous-vehicle development, e.g. to protect entrenched interests or because of irrational fears, but it could also stop states interested in being on the forefront of research from doing more interesting things.

It seems like the sort of thing you'd want when products were further along the development path and having a broad, harmonized-rules marketplace is necessary to move further, but not when most of the tech is still pretty early R&D work.

Down the road, you can start to relax the preemption (theoretically) and let the market forces keep unwise state regulation in check.

But barring states from regulating this in their own borders is about as much of a sweetheart bill for business as you can get, it ensures they only have to spend their lobbying money on one legislative body.

But it also means that they only need to meet one standard, not 50. Which sounds like the right thing to do when it comes to regulating something mobile that will operate in all 50 states.

Current manufactures only offer two versions of cars. One is for most states. The other is for a particular state and all the other states on the "I'm with him" bandwagon.

If a certain state would adopt federal recommendations for certain vehicle requirements then things would be greatly simplified.

How can you say that when not all states have even enacted legislation to regulate self-driving cars?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Self_Driving_Cars_Legaliz...

Even minor changes between states are expensive for automakers to manage, and it's bad for consumers if some manufacturers choose to certify their cars for certain states -- you could end up buying a car that you not only can't legally take to another state, but the car will refuse to go there at all to avoid manufacturer liability.