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GENEVA: The first global regulations for fully autonomous vehicles were adopted Wednesday, a UN agency said, establishing uniform international safety requirements that could pave the way for larger-scale rollouts of self-driving cars.

Safety concerns and the cost of developing next-level systems have long slowed progress on autonomous vehicles. As self-driving cars have begun to hit the road in a growing number of cities, the fragmented national approaches to regulation have spurred manufacturer fears that vehicles developed for one market could be blocked from others.