The NHTSA has proposed using cyan-colored lights to identify vehicles operating autonomously, along with other additions to get ready for autonomous vehicles.

As the autonomous vehicles start to spread on US roads, questions have come up about how to deal with these new driverless vehicles.

One question involves emergency response – not only do the vehicles need to be prepared to respond to emergency personnel, those personnel need to recognize when a car is operating autonomously. A police officer needs to know that nobody’s in the driver seat, or an emergency responder needs to know that if there’s nobody in the driver’s seat, that’s not necessarily because there’s a missing driver somewhere who needs rescue.

These are just some of the reasons one might want to know whether a car is operating autonomously, but as of yet, there is no standardized messaging to suggest that a vehicle is doing so.

This week, NHTSA proposed an answer.…