Driverless Cars

The Self-Driving Car Fight in Congress Isn't Really About Safety at All

Bootleggers, Baptists, and the fight over who gets to write America's self-driving car rules.

Andrew Miller | 5.1.2026 12:00 PM

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(Illustration: DPPA/Sipa USA/imageBROKER/Manuel Kamuf/Newscom)

To put American traffic deaths in perspective, consider the Miami Marlins. Since 2012, the baseball team has played its home games at the stadium now called LoanDepot Park. The field's official capacity is 36,742, roughly the number of Americans who die in traffic crashes every year. America loses a baseball stadium's worth of lives to vehicular accidents every 12 months.

For the first time, there's a way to prevent many, and perhaps most, of those deaths: self-driving cars. 

But self-driving cars are controversial. Some worry about safety. Others worry about jobs. Opposition from unions and local political figures has slowed their rollout in cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston. And Congress has now taken up the task of writing a law that would govern how self-driving cars operate and what safety measures they must meet. The bulk of current efforts has produced not one bill but two, which pull in opposite directions.

On one side is the SELF DRIVE Act, which would create the first federal statute on automated vehicle (A.V.) safety. 

Along with companion legislation, the bill would require manufacturers to self-certify their systems against a "safety case" standard, i.e., a structured and evidence-based argument that their system won't pose an unreasonable risk of accidents. It would permit companies to deploy as many as 90,000 vehicles on public streets, up from the current cap of 2,500. The bill passed a House subcommittee in February on a 12–11 vote and now awaits a full committee markup (that has not yet been scheduled). 

On the other side is the Stay in Your Lane Act, introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.). It would require manufacturers to define an "operational design domain" (ODD), i.e., the specific conditions under which their system is designed to operate safely, and prohibit operation outside it. 

The driving forces behind the bills and their different emphases will be familiar to anyone who has studied how high-stakes regulation often works. And it all goes back to Prohibition.

A century ago, both church folk and gangsters advocated for alcohol restrictions. The former backed Prohibition out of sincere moral conviction, the latter out of a desire to seize a market for themselves. To describe such unlikely alignments, economist Bruce Yandle coined the term "bootleggers and Baptists." The Baptists act as high-minded advocates who provide public legitimacy for a rule; the bootleggers serve as commercial interests who stand to benefit and provide political muscle. 

The same sort of high-low coalition is present in the push for self-driving car laws. Though both bills are framed by their proponents as safety measures, each has its own mix of Baptists and bootleggers in support. Yet despite their safety-focused arguments, neither side is engaging with the actual safety data that would settle the debate. 

The Bill Incumbents Wrote for Themselves

The "Baptist" case for the SELF DRIVE Act is simple enough: more self-driving cars, deployed more quickly, would save more lives. There's something to this idea. Most of the 40,000 road deaths annually are caused by human error; the deployment of driving automation at scale nationally could prevent many of them.

The current patchwork of 34 different state laws—some permissive, some restrictive, and often incompatible—makes that difficult. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has argued that Chinese firms now lead in cumulative miles without a human driver, total deployments, and fleet size: a claim the industry deploys freely, and one that points to real competitive anxiety. The........

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