Nevada authorises autonomous vehicles by statute
On 16 June 2011 the Governor of Nevada approved Assembly Bill 511: the Department of Motor Vehicles must by 1 March 2012 adopt regulations under which autonomous vehicles may operate on the state's highways, with requirements for the vehicle, insurance and safety, and testing only in specified areas.
Why it matters
A state law recognised a car that drives without a person's involvement as a lawful road user and gave an agency a mandate to admit it. It was under that mandate that the first testing licence was issued the following year.
Section 8 defines an autonomous vehicle as one that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and GPS coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator, and artificial intelligence as the use of computers to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic human behaviour; sensors include cameras, lasers and radar. The regulations must set requirements for the vehicle before it goes on a highway, for insurance, minimum safety standards and testing, and restrict testing to specified geographic areas. Section 2 adds a driver's licence endorsement. Most of the bill concerns privileges for alternative-fuel vehicles, which expire on 1 January 2018; the autonomous-vehicle sections do not. Votes: Assembly 36 to 6, Senate 20 to 1. The record does not describe the department's regulations themselves. The Legislature's site blocks both the shell and the browser; the text and history were read in archived copies.