"“As near as I can tell from the language and the context, what’s going on is a specific effort to implement a specific regime for a specific company,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a legal scholar with the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies self-driving vehicles.
But Smith, the AV researcher, says the every-state-for-itself approach has some advantages. “There’s opportunity for experimentation, for different entities to take different approaches toward automated driving and proceed state by state,” he says. “We don’t have the best solution yet, and states are going to contribute to this dialogue.” Michigan can hype its automakers. Pennsylvania, now working on regulations, may just favor Uber, which is running an autonomous taxi pilot in Pittsburgh. Other states looking to join the fun could learn from those going first."