High-tech Boston area in legal bind on driverless-car tests

With its Colonial-era street patterns, icy winters, notoriously aggressive drivers and high-tech talent, the Boston region would seem the perfect place to test self-driving cars and ensure they can handle anything thrown at them. But the area, and indeed the entire Northeast, has no law outlining how the technology should be driven and tested. And lawmakers who want to respond are being spurned by leaders of the fast-growing industry, who would rather have no rules than a patchwork of state laws getting in their way. "I'm hoping that the New England states will make it possible for us to do this work right at home very soon," said Daniela Rus, a professor who directs the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has partnered with Toyota to advance autonomous driving. "We have more flexibility testing our algorithms and self-driving vehicles in Singapore than we do here. It's really onerous to pack up your research and move to a place to test it."