California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is enacting new regulations that mean cars without drivers, such as Tesla Robotaxis and Waymo rideshare cars, will be subject to police ticketing — even though there’s no driver in the car to accept it.

The change is part of a rollout of 2024 legislation on autonomous vehicles and part of a set of new requirements approved on April 28 by the state’s DMV. The ticketing would be a “notice of AV (autonomous vehicle) noncompliance” issued to the manufacturer of an autonomous vehicle. 

Other requirements involve testing self-driving cars before they hit the road: 50,000 miles of testing in each phase 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,” the DMV’s director, Steve Gordon, said in a statement.

Waymo cars got some unwanted attention when they stalled during a San Francisco power outage last year and when they blocked EMS after a mass shooting in Texas. They are also the subject of an investigation into incidents of illegally driving past stopped school buses.

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

Clearing up ticketing confusion

Sam Abuelsamid, an autonomous vehicle safety expert and analyst for auto research firm Telemetry, said that the California rules clear up a disconnect that prevented law enforcement from issuing citations.

“In the absence of a human driver, the laws were somewhat ambiguous about who to issue the ticket to, and every manufacturer has different ways for police and emergency responders to interact with AVs, so tickets often didn’t get issued,” Abuelsamid said.

He explained, “If a Waymo violates a traffic law, the ticket goes to Waymo in Mountain View. If a Zoox does it, they get the ticket. Whoever is responsible for the software is considered the driver.”

Because companies working on the software and hardware for these types of vehicles are in competition with each other, they aren’t keen on sharing data. 

Abuelsamid said there’s no readily available safety data for the self-driving vehicle industry at present. However, as far as general safety, he said, “Most AVs tend to drive fairly conservatively and rarely ever directly cause a crash.”

But that conservative driving style can lead human drivers to run into them, and they can also act out in other ways, such as Waymo’s issue with school buses. 

That points to another thing people should know about self-driving cars. They’re not all built the same. Tesla, for instance, uses different technologies than other companies, which has led to some unpredictable behavior in its Robotaxi fleet, which still relies on human monitors in many cases.

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