Welcome to the Tech Policy podcast. I'm Evan Swartzdriver. On today's show, how will connected vehicles interact with each other? You might have heard a recent episode I did with Brent Scorpe from the Mercatus Center, where we talked about vehicle to infrastructure and how high-tech infrastructure built along highways and roads could be the future of autonomous

vehicles and could serve as the main conduit for communication.

But there's others in the space who think that the vehicles are actually going to have to

interact with each other more, or there's just a lot of views about how to approach this

very new and interesting area of autonomous vehicles.

So joining me to discuss this is Mark Scribner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise

Institute. Mark, thanks for joining the show.

Great to be back, Evan.

So we've talked about the federal government's guidelines on autonomous vehicles before,

and there's new ones now.

The Federal Highway Administration just released guidelines

on how connected vehicles should be interacting with the infrastructure, whereas previously they

had released guidelines about how to get approval for an autonomous vehicle. And just to start out,

what is your reaction, the reaction of your organization to these guidelines

coming from the federal government? And I should mention that this is not, this is clearly from

the Obama administration. It's not nearly, that would be really crazy if Trump was able to turn

around a completely different approach that quickly. So this is still the Obama administration on its way out, but what do you think of these

guidelines?

So I think the problem with the Federal Highway Administration's vehicle to infrastructure

guidance document is similar to the problems with the National Highway Traffic Safety

Administration's proposed rule on vehicle-to-vehicle communications,

and that is it makes a lot of assumptions that aren't backed up by any sort of real evidence.

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