Self-driving cars will soon be subject to moving tickets in California

The California Department of Motor Vehicles is enacting new regulations that mean driverless cars, e.g Tesla robot and Waymo Ride-sharing cars will be subject to police tickets – even though there is no driver in the car to accept them.

Change is part of the proposition Legislation 2024 On autonomous vehicles and part of a group of New requirements have been approved on April 28 by the state DMV. The tickets will be a “Notice of Non-Compliance for AV (Autonomous Vehicle)” 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 semi-trucks. The rules include more control over self-driving cars during emergencies.

“These updates support the growth of the AV industry by enhancing public safety and transparency while adding additional accountability for AV manufacturers,” DMV Director Steve Gordon said in a statement.

Waymo cars got some unwanted attention when they stopped during… Power outages in San Francisco last year And when they are EMS banned after mass shooting in Texas. It is also under investigation for accidents Driving illegally in front of parked school buses.

A Waymo representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Remove ticket confusion

Sam Abu Al-SamidCalifornia’s rules remove a disconnect that has prevented law enforcement from issuing citations, said an autonomous vehicle safety expert and analyst for automotive research firm Telemetry.

“In the absence of a human driver, the laws were somewhat vague about who to issue a ticket to, and each manufacturer has different ways for police and emergency responders to interact with autonomous vehicles, so tickets were often not issued,” Abu Al-Samid said.

“If a Waymo car violates a traffic law, the ticket goes to Waymo in Mountain View. If Zoox does that, they get the ticket. Whoever is in charge of the program is the driver,” he explained.

Because companies working on the software and hardware for these types of vehicles compete with each other, they don’t want to share data.

Abu Al-Samad said there is no readily available safety data for the autonomous vehicle industry at present. However, in terms of public safety, he said, “Most autonomous vehicles tend to drive fairly conservatively and rarely directly cause accidents.”

But this conservative driving style can cause human drivers to crash into them, and they can also behave in other ways, like Waymo’s problem with school buses.

This points to something else people should know about self-driving cars. They are not all built the same way. Tesla, for example, uses different technologies than other companies, which has led to some unpredictable behavior in its Robotaxi fleet, which still relies on human observers in many cases.

A Tesla representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.