Which seems likely to me to be a relatively new legal status carved out specifically for autonomous vehicles. In a pre-AV world, my impression has been that it

Which seems likely to me to be a relatively new legal status carved out specifically for autonomous vehicles. In a pre-AV world, my impression has been that it's been absolutely illegal to remotely operate vehicles on public roads. Maybe I'm wrong though. My impression here has been influenced by admittedly bored and unnecessary neighborhood police harassing me in my youth for purportedly illegally operating RC cars on public streets, which didn't even weigh thousands of pounds. It might be interesting to understand how much lobbying/$$ was necessary to get the AV laws on the books as written today.