HMM: The way we regulate self-driving cars is broken—here’s how to fix it.

The key issue is this: the current system is built around an assumption that cars will be purchased and owned by customers. But the pioneers of the driverless world—including Waymo, Cruise, and Uber—are not planning to sell cars to the public. Instead, they’re planning to build driverless taxi services that customers will buy one ride at a time.

This has big implications for the way regulators approach their jobs. Federal car regulations focus on ensuring that a car is safe at the moment it rolls off the assembly line. But as last month’s crash makes clear, the safety of a driverless taxi service depends on a lot more than just the physical features of the cars themselves.

For example, dash cam footage from last month’s Uber crash showed the safety driver looking down at her lap for five agonizing seconds before the fatal crash. Should Uber have done more to train and supervise its safety drivers? Should Uber have continued to put two people in each car, rather than switching to a single driver? Not only are there no federal rules on these questions, at the time of the crash the public was completely in the dark about how Uber and its competitors were dealing with the issue.

Driverless cars are interesting from a technological and regulatory perspective, but as someone who really enjoys driving, they seem like a solution in search of a problem.