Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill called the “SELF DRIVE” Act It will be the first national law for self-driving cars. This act aims to establish regulations for self-driving cars that are important for the industry to continue developing.

“Technology has progressed so far so now we need regulations for these types of things,” senior Jeremy Lin said. “Hopefully [self-driving cars] are accessible and affordable for everyone to use.”

A hotbed for testing self-driving cars is the Silicon Valley. Lin is an advocate for self-driving cars because the new changes to the legislature will allow companies like Google to develop self-driving cars for public use. This in turn, will create an optimal environment for these vehicles to operate. The California DMV is heavily promoting the use of self-driving cars with a new legislature that allows these cars to travel the state’s highways without human drivers for the first time.

In addition to companies being able to operate self-driving vehicles, California is only allowed these vehicles to operate in designated areas, and they must send the DMV all sorts of information about how these vehicles react to different scenarios which may or may not be programmed into the car’s control unit. If a company does not supply the DMV with this information, then their licenses to operate self-driving vehicles without drivers will be revoked.

Although the self-driving utopia that many people envision is probably many years away, California is taking steps to ensure that when these cars are released to the public, they’ll be the first ones to embrace them.