A New Era for the Automobile

Here's how it usually happens: Technology comes first, and the law follows. Airplanes first flew across the skies long before control towers popped up, and cellphones were ubiquitous long before texting-while-driving was outlawed. It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to predict all the ways in which transformative new machines will change the world. That doesn't, and shouldn't, stop people from trying. U.S. Department of Transportation officials on Tuesday unveiled long-awaited policy guidelines for self-driving cars, issuing a sweeping document that reveals how the nation's top transportation leaders plan to regulate new technology that promises to make the roads vastly safer. The guidelines clearly demonstrate the federal government's support for driverless cars, and serve as a regulatory blueprint to "accelerate the HAV [highly autonomous vehicle] revolution" safely and consistently across the nation, the document says.