Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swartzrover. On today's show, self-driving cars, how should they be regulated? About a month ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, aka NHTSA, as I will refer to it for the rest of the show, put out a set of guidelines on self-driving vehicles. While as we

discussed on a previous show, those are non-binding, of course they are a signal of what's to come.

Joining me to discuss how California is trying to adapt the federal rules, their DMV is issuing a new

policy. Mark Scribner, research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mark, thanks for joining the show. Good to be back. Thanks, Evan. And yeah, we had a recent episode, Rules for the driverless road.

You should check that out where Mark and I discuss the federal rules. Also joining the show is the

2020 Libertarian Party nominee for President Barron Soka, also president of Tech Freedom. How do you do two presidents at the same time?

Barron, thank you for joining the show. I can't wait. Yeah. I'm sure this won't screw up our tax status at all. So anyway, so.

I'm sure the IRS listens to every episode. Yeah, I bet. That would explain our download count.

Wow, shots fired. All right. So now that we're done making fun of ourselves, Mark, you came on the show to talk about the NHTSA guidelines. And we did a deep dive into there. But can you just for listeners who might not have heard that episode briefly recap what the Obama administration's guidelines on self-driving cars were all about?

Yeah. So there are four sections. The first lays out a 15-point

safety assessment, again, that's voluntary, non-binding, but they ask manufacturers, developers,

to look at these various issues that range from crashworthiness, which is a traditional

NHTSA role, to cybersecurity, which is a traditional NHTSA role

to cybersecurity, which is something that NHTSA is now just getting involved in.

Second section dealt with model state policy recommendations for how states that wish to

craft regulations, legislation, to promote testing and deployment on public roads, what they should do.

The third section dealt with NHTSA's current regulatory authorities

and discussed how it may promote this technology by doing things like exempting from

federal motor vehicle safety standards some of these new technologies that

there may be sort of ambiguous issues with those regulations and just fully exempting the

technology from them are also speeding up sort of the NHTSA's general counsel's sort of interpretations of the existing rules,

where you may have conflicts, especially if you're dealing with an autonomous technology,

...