Washington Post -- When self-driving cars begin zipping through Northern Virginia this year, they won’t need any special registration, and the testers sitting behind the wheel won’t need a special license. In the eyes of the law, they’ll be regular cars.
Virginia is one of a handful of states seeking to attract the potentially lucrative business of developing self-driving cars. And along with a few other states, its lawmakers and regulators are inclined to welcome the industry — and get out of the way.
California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to legalize automated vehicles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Of those, two have set out detailed regulations.
In states such as Virginia and Texas, however, self-driving cars can hit the roadways thanks to a simple argument: Doing so is legal because the law doesn’t say otherwise.
“Automated vehicles are probably legal,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor whose research helped advance that interpretation. “That is the default assumption.”
That’s the view Google took this summer when it put driverless, retrofitted Lexus SUVs on the road in Austin, the first time the tech giant has run tests outside of California. Texas transportation officials say they are not involved with the project.
And on the strength of that argument, auto parts maker Delphi took a prototype on a cross-country trip from San Francisco to New York, passing through 15 states, nearly all of them lacking laws that address autonomous cars.
