There’s a reason every company is testing self-driving cars in Arizona. It’s sunny. It’s warm. It’s flat (at least around Phoenix).
And according to The New York Times, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is excited about making Arizona a leader in autonomous vehicle testing.
While Uber and Waymo were working through regulatory barriers testing in California, Ducey recruited them to Arizona with an “open for business” attitude.
“We responded by saying we weren’t going to hassle them,” Mr. Ducey said of Uber. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank my partner in growing the Arizona economy, Jerry Brown”, the Democratic governor of California.
The article closes with several anecdotes of human drivers crashing into self-driving cars, because that’s what human drivers do, and seizes on those anecdotes to suggest Arizona isn’t ready for self-driving cars.
I’m not sold.
Louis Brandeis once postulated that the beauty of American federalism is that each state is its own little laboratory of democracy, experimenting on its own, without risk to the rest of the country.
God bless Arizona for that.
David Silver 