When it appeared that the driverless-car business might become a going concern, my take on the industry was that the final five percent of bugs to be worked out might be more challenging than the first 95% of the enterprise had been. I don’t think that was a controversial opinion. The smallest problems are the knottiest in this case.

For a few years, it seemed equal to those technological challenges might be snafus caused by a lack of legal framework, but 2016 has been an inflection point. Last month, the Obama Administration proposed $4 billion over the next decade to ameliorate the industry’s realization, the government firmly behind the U.S. winning this nouveau “Space Race.” That measure will encourage Europe and Asia forward, untangling its own limits and liabilities.

Two more important pieces of autonomous-car legalese have come to light, one in regards to the definition of a “driver” in America and the other a patent filed by Google. Excerpts follow.

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From Paul Lienert and David Shepardson of Reuters:

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step towards ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc , of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week.

Google’s self-driving car unit on Nov. 12 submitted a proposed design for a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver,” the letter to Google from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh said.

“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” NHTSA’s letter said.

“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”•

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From Future Tech Hub:

Google wants to deliver your package through self-driving trucks. The tech giant has been awarded a  patent described as an “autonomous delivery platform” for delivery trucks. The self-driving trucks will be equipped with lockers which can be opened only with the access codes assigned to the customer. Credit cards can also be used by users to open. The trucks will drive away to other location to deliver once the packages are dispatched. The automated vehicle will drive to the customers address. Once after arriving, it will send an SMS alert with the access codes to the lockers.•