The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) -  just released a 115 page policy regulation document - with recommended legal structures for self-driving cars.

You can download / read the full document here.

This comes after nearly a decade of work by Google, Tesla and various automakers. Ford is hoping to have fully automated vehicles ready for consumer sales by 2021. 

The report topics cover:

• Data Recording and Sharing
• Privacy
• System Safety
• Vehicle Cybersecurity
• Human Machine Interface
• Crashworthiness
• Consumer Education and Training
• Registration and Certification
• Post-Crash Behavior
• Federal, State and Local Laws
• Operational Design Domain
• Object and Event Detection and Response
• Fall Back (Minimal Risk Condition)
• Validation Methods
• Ethical Considerations

The Self-Driving Dilemma: Should Your Car Kill You To Save Others?

The ethics problems are the most ambiguous, and are being left open to interpretation by lawmakers. It goes on to however, claim that while debating hypothetical situations to postpone the release of self-driving cars - NOT releasing them will cost more lives. Statistically self-driving cars are far safer than human drivers -delays cost more lives than they save.

The NHTSA also setup a few 'authorities' for passing these new laws. There will be pre-market safety assurance, a pre-market approval, followed by a cease-and-desist authority to take cars off the road. There will also be a post-sale authority to regulate software changes.

So - there's going to be a lot of new regulatory jobs created by self-driving cars. However, something tells me this won't be nearly as many jobs as the 4.1 MILLION driver jobs that will suddenly be obsolete.