Seven years after Google started developing robocars, 14 months after a Florida man died in a Tesla Model S that was driving itself, and almost a year after self-driving Ubers started picking up passengers in Pennsylvania, Congress might actually start regulating autonomous vehicles.

Nearly everyone working on this emerging technology, from automakers to the tech companies to the government watchdogs, agrees that it's about time. The robocars scurrying about places like Austin and Boston and San Francisco operate under a mélange of state and local rules that lay down different requirements and appease myriad special interests. And if this patchwork persists, bringing these cars to the market could be a major headache.

No longer. Maybe. In June, the Senate published bipartisan principles outlining what the legislation might look like. And on Wednesday, members of a House subcommittee unanimously approved a big autonomous vehicle package, which will make it easier for federal regulators to make all the rules. (The full House Energy and Commerce Committee wants to consider the legislation before the House's August recess, a committee spokesperson said.) Congress, it seems, wants to shred the patchwork of rules and regulations and blanket the nation in uniform guidelines that allow the technology to develop while ensuring everyone it will be safe. But giving the feds that authority creates some problems—and raises plenty of questions.

A New Regime

Part of the problem here is autonomous vehicles don't fit neatly into the current regulatory structure. The Department of Transportation dictates how vehicles are built (airbags, seat belts, crumple zones), but states regulate their operation (licensing, insurance, traffic laws). That division of labor doesn't work when how the car is designed governs how it is operated.

This hasn't changed in the seven years since Google turned its first autonomous vehicle prototypes loose on the streets of Mountain View, California. It was only last fall that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its guidelines for self-driving cars and asked automakers and others for their input.

In the absence of any federal oversight, California, Nevada, Michigan, and other states wrote their own rules. Each takes a different approach to ensuring public safety without stifling innovation. Arizona requires nothing more than a standard vehicle registration, for example, while New York demands all robocars have police escorts.

Which is why the legislation approved by the House subcommittee this week prioritizes “preemption”—a fancy way of saying the federal rules would supersede state and local regulations. That may be most annoying for California, which has spent years hashing things out with automakers and tech companies. The Golden State requires companies submit public data on what their cars are doing and when they crash. Under the House package, that authority probably would fall to federal regulators, and it's not clear what data might be made public.

Testing

The proposed House legislation would also permit each manufacturer to test as many as 100,000 robocars that don't quite meet federal standards, which require things like steering wheels and foot-activated brakes that do not apply to autonomous vehicles. Right now, the rules permit just 2,500 exemptions. The industry argues easing that could advance the technology. “Testing AVs is going to require millions and millions—if not trillions—of miles," says Greg Rogers, who writes about autonomous vehicle regulation for the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank. The more cars on the roads, the faster you rack up miles.

Under the legislation, those exemptions would serve as a stopgap while NHTSA figures out how to ensure autonomous driving is safe and rewrites its rules.