SINCE AN INTERNET search company named Google began testing self-driving vehicles more than a decade ago, the still-in-development technology has faced a niggling issue: The federal vehicle safety rules that govern car design assume that a human sits behind the steering wheel of each vehicle. In fact, they assume each vehicle has a steering wheel. Now, those rules may begin to change. Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the first time proposed tweaks to its vehicle safety rules to help ease the way for the widespread use of self-driving cars.
