Brad Templeton, who's been working on self-driving cars for a few years now, analyzed this in http://ideas.4brad.com/critique-nhtsas-newly-released-recomm.... He says, "Broadly, this is very much the wrong direction... the progress of robocar development in the USA may be seriously negatively affected."
> I have written that having 50 sets of rules may not be that bad an idea because jurisdictional competition can allow legal innovation and having software load new parameters as you drive over a border is not that hard.
I'm not sure I would put much weight behind what he has to say.
This is a big deal.