I'm very glad to see that this is spreading. It would have been really annoying for Google to perfect their car and then have nowhere to drive it because of silly legislations. It wouldn't be the first time senators were afraid of change...
I'm still waiting to see what the opposition is going to do when they get organized. If you thought Uber was a threat to cabs, they don't hold a candle to a fleet of self driving cars with an NFC payment option.
[1] Which was of course a challenge for the Segway
That said, it wasn't legislation that made Segway fail.
True, but it was pretty contributory. For much of its 'early adopter' period people had no idea whether or not they would get a ticket for riding one on the sidewalk, and then later the knew that they would in most places. That certainly mitigated sales significantly.
Similarly if self driving cars were available today and you could only 'legally' use them in California and Nevada in self driving mode, and they were "probably" going to be illegal most everywhere else, that would make it hard to sell them.
Sometimes governments actually get it right.
Truth is there isn't enough space for sedgeways over here. Pavements too narrow, roads too littered with parked cars.
But I can see how in the vast empty sidewalks of some suburbs that riding bicycles on the sidewalk is a good idea, and did so myself when I was a child.
Further, I would submit that this is mostly due to the legislators themselves.
A trucker that doesn't have to 1) eat 2) sleep 3) experience fatigue -- this trucker is vastly superior. There is already a lot of analytics measuring truck performance, metrics which would make autonomous trucks very feasible.
Transport trucks spend hours on interstates between points going in relatively straight lines, at relatively low traffic times.
The trucking industry will be dead 5-10 years after robot trucks start appearing on the road.
EDIT: Sorry "trucking industry" should be in quotes, as yes, by this I mean the idea of people driving trucks, which is 90% of the "industry". The actual industry itself isn't going anywhere, agreed. My fault in the miscommunication.
And then there's all the service stops which now offer food, etc for truckers. I expect few of them will successful transition to serve tourists exclusively.
The existing actors, however, might well be unable to drive that transition and they might consequently die and be replaced by other, new actors.
That said, that "shift" is when it's going to be a really, really shitty time to be a truck driver, as the influx of people competing for fewer and fewer jobs is going to drive prices (wages) down into pits of dark despair.
I'm pretty sure the laws stipulate that a licensed driver must be in the drivers seat.
As chollida1 points out, UPS/Fedex may not be allowed to lift the CLD requirement quite yet, but that will probably come in time.
That's enough for a pair of drivers to keep the truck on the road continuously, and maybe almost enough to make it worthwhile to have just a single driver (so the cab owner doesn't have to split his profits with anyone). After gradually raising hours over the course of a few years, you can declare drivers optional. Owner-operators would still ride in the cab so they could handle pickup and delivery of trailers, but fleet owners might just hire drivers on the spot for things like that.
Edit: My (mis)understanding of trucking hours of service was based on a conversation with a truck drive a few months ago. Apparently, you can drive 14 hours continuously after taking 10 hours off. However, I think the point still stands that truck drivers will be less resistant to the introduction of robotic trucks if they perceive the change as a (at least short-term) benefit to them by increasing allowable driving time.
And fix the truck when it breaks down (if possible). And deal with problems when the wrong shipment goes to the wrong place, etc.
And protect the contents of the truck.
Driving is just one piece.
My guess is that comfort with this as a concept will be generational, as are lots of things. I like the idea a lot, but I also will miss driving. I doubt my daughter will miss driving in the slightest.
I don't think anybody will miss driving in traffic, but until there's some other way to experience the combined sense of control, shifting G-forces, and the world streaming by, manual driving on sparsely populated roads will always be desirable.
We should have put the tech into the mars rover.