Highly Automated Vehicle Policy in the United States: Six Questions Exposing the Structural Misalignment Between Perception, Regulation, and Enforcement

Author(s): Xianbiao Hu
Year: 2026
Journal / Venue: Transportation Research Today
Status: Published
DOI: 10.1016/j.trt.2026.100009
Category: Automated Vehicles › AV Policy & Regulation

What problem does this research solve?

Highly automated vehicle (HAV) deployment is expanding fast — Waymo robotaxis operate in multiple U.S. cities, Aurora runs driverless freight trucks on the Dallas–Houston corridor, and the industry has logged over 145 million autonomous miles. Yet public perception of “self-driving cars” has drifted far ahead of what the technology and the law actually allow: no new vehicle a consumer can currently purchase operates beyond SAE Level 2, and in several states only corporations — not individuals — may hold an operating certificate.

This paper argues that gap is not simply a public-education problem. It is produced by three structural forces acting together:

American federalism — 50 states have built 50 independent regulatory regimes with no automatic reciprocity between them
Market incentives — companies are rewarded for blurring the line between driver assistance and genuine autonomy (e.g., naming a Level 2 system “Full Self-Driving”)
Legislative lag — statutes get signed faster than the enforcement training, protocols, and institutional capacity needed to implement them

What did we do?

The analysis draws on three evidence streams: expert focus groups with 35 participants from 29 organizations, conducted as part of a PennDOT-funded evaluation of Pennsylvania’s Act 130; a legislative review covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia; and publicly available industry data on operational economics and safety performance.

From that evidence, the paper poses six diagnostic questions that trace each structural force through to a concrete policy failure:

Is your car really “self-driving”? — No vehicle in the current consumer market operates beyond SAE Level 2; every Level 4 system is a corporate fleet, not something an individual can buy.
Who is allowed to put an HAV on the road? — Only 11 of 34 states with any HAV framework have detailed, AV-specific rules, and states disagree fundamentally on who may hold a certificate (organizations only vs. individuals exempt vs. commercial-only).
Should all levels of automation be regulated the same way? — Most statutes, including Act 130, lump Level 3, 4, and 5 into a single “HAV” category, despite very different enforcement needs.
What does it take for “driverless” vehicles to scale economically? — Every current HAV deployment still relies on remote human operators; cost per mile depends heavily on the truck-to-operator ratio.
Can an HAV company operate across state lines? — Federal unification efforts (the SELF DRIVE Act) have failed three times in a decade.
What happens after the law is signed? — Statutes pass in a single legislative session; the enforcement infrastructure to implement them (officer protocols, first-responder training, crash reporting) takes years to build.

What can this be used for?

State DOTs and legislators: a structural diagnosis — rather than a state-by-state list of rules — for why AV statutes routinely underperform after enactment, plus six targeted policy recommendations.
Companies planning interstate HAV operations: a concrete illustration (a Pennsylvania-to-Texas freight run along I-81/I-40) of how six states can mean six incompatible insurance and permitting regimes on a single trip.
Researchers studying AV governance: a reusable framework — federalism, market incentives, legislative lag — for analyzing regulatory fragmentation in other emerging-technology domains, not just HAVs.

What are the key findings?

No new vehicle a consumer can currently purchase operates beyond SAE Level 2 — the consumer “self-driving car” does not exist in any legally meaningful sense.
A single interstate freight trip can cross six states with six incompatible regulatory regimes; insurance requirements alone range from $0 to $5 million, with no automatic interstate reciprocity.
State-level fragmentation is a durable institutional feature of American HAV governance, not a temporary phase the country will grow out of.
Autonomous freight is identified as the highest-return near-term policy priority, given its comparatively simpler path to economic viability.
Six structural recommendations follow directly from the six questions: standardized consumer-facing automation labeling, a differentiated regulatory framework for Level 3 vs. Level 4/5 (following the EU’s UNECE Regulation 157), interstate compacts prioritizing freight corridors, mandatory standardized enforcement and emergency-response protocols, transparent disclosure of remote-operator ratios and operating economics, and coordinated harmonization of autonomous freight corridors.

The full paper, slide deck, complete data tables, and underlying PennDOT Act 130 evaluation materials are available in the project repository.

Cite This Paper

Hu, X. (2026). Highly automated vehicle policy in the United States: Six questions exposing the structural misalignment between perception, regulation, and enforcement. Transportation Research Today, 1, 100009. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trt.2026.100009