The California Department of Motor Vehicles is enacting new rules for driverless cars, such as Tesla Robotaxis again Waymo traffic, will be given police tickets — even if there is no driver in the car to accept it.
The change is part of the 2024 autonomous vehicle regulation and part of a set of new requirements approved on April 28 by the state’s DMV. Ticketing will be an “AV (autonomous vehicle) non-compliance notice” issued to the manufacturer of the autonomous vehicle.
Other requirements include testing self-driving cars before they hit the road: 50,000 miles of testing at each stage of development for light-duty vehicles and 500,000 miles for heavy-duty vehicles like light trucks. The rules include more regulation of self-driving cars during emergencies.
“These revisions support the growth of the AV industry by improving public safety and transparency while adding more accountability to AV manufacturers,” DMV director Steve Gordon said in a statement.
Waymo vehicles received unwanted attention when they stopped during a power outage in San Francisco last year and when they blocked EMS after a mass shooting in Texas. They are also being investigated for cases of illegal driving of school buses that were stopped.
A representative for Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Clears ticket confusion
Sam Abuelsamid, an expert on autonomous vehicle safety and an analyst for the automotive research firm Telemetry, said California laws specify a cutoff that prevented law enforcement from issuing citations.
“Without a human driver, the rules weren’t clear on who would be ticketed, and every manufacturer had different ways for police and emergency services to contact AVs, so tickets weren’t issued,” Abuelsamid said.
He explained, “If Waymo breaks a traffic law, the ticket goes to Waymo in Mountain View. If Zoox does it, they get a ticket. Whoever is responsible for the software is considered a driver.”
Because the software and hardware companies for these types of vehicles compete with each other, they are reluctant to share data.
Abuelsamid said there is no readily available safety information for the self-driving car industry right now. However, in terms of general safety, he said, “Most AVs tend to drive in an orderly manner and rarely cause direct accidents.”
But that common driving style can lead to human drivers meeting them, and they can imitate them in other ways, like Waymo’s case with school buses.
That points to another thing people should know about self-driving cars. They are not built the same way. Tesla, for example, uses different technology than other companies, which has led to some unpredictable behavior in its Robotaxi fleet, which still relies on human monitors in most cases.
A representative from Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.