CA emissions have forced the automakers to offer basically two versions of every vehicle for the past half century or so. Nobody in the industry wants a repeat of that because it costs money.
What happened to the states being policy laboratories? I thought Republicans were for local control? Or is that only for school textbooks and baking wedding cakes.
Not the lives of the people who would have been saved by safety features in a car they weren't driving because they couldn't afford it or because the implementation of a particular safety feature was a lower priority than the implementing a second variant of emissions equipment and calibration.
Stuff like this is fairly zero sum.
>What happened to the states being policy laboratories
The federal government could implement this as a FMVSS if they wanted.
Neither party has a monopoly on saying one thing and doing another.