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California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

326 points by geox 6mo ago

zdw 6mo ago
Ideally the fees would be similar to the Norway model, where some tickets are tied to the income of the driver, in this case the pre-tax earnings of the company that created the driverless car.
- mathcartney 6mo ago
  I think this could be a good compromise. Could have a floor value but the ceiling can vary accordingly.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
  Assuming you divide it down to the earnings per car, that makes perfect sense. Of course right now they aren't making any profit at all, and by the time it is relevant it is likely that the cars will commit substantially no violations at all.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- cma 6mo ago
  Isn't Norway only for drunk driving? Finland has it for massive speed excesses, but it is based on net taxable income taking out business expenses for taxi drivers, and Waymo is still negative. If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector. But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.
- Aachen 6mo ago
  That can make sense (opinions differ) for individuals, but it's not like the company is advertising with "we get you there at 1.2x legal speed". They're not competing on that; they're not choosing to do this on purpose like an individual might choose to speed (for example because of economic incentives if their hourly price is high) If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway
  - golem14 6mo ago
    I think a rich person would then do the rational thing and hire a cheap driver who also owns and operates their car. Noone sane would be willing to assume basically unlimited liability for someone else's software. Maybe that's good thing - some work for humans after the robots take over, albeit as human legal shields ;)
  - preinheimer 6mo ago
    They may not advertise “getting you there at 1.2x legal speed” but the sooner they drop you off, the sooner they can get another fare. Over a whole fleet it will add up to changing the size of the required fleet. If getting a ticket one ride in a thousand is cheaper than deploying another 2000 cars to make up for the increased trip time I’d expect them to keep getting tickets. I’m also not sure they don’t do it on purpose. Tesla self driving has an aggressive mode willing to speed and roll through stop signs. Those were deliberate, law breaking, choices.
    - Aachen 6mo ago
      Oh, I actually read an article about that this morning in bed but didn't imagine regulators would approve a mode that is programmed to ignore laws. Not sure how it works where you're from but in the Netherlands, where Tesla did the approval process to subsequently apply for an EU license for using the drive assistance mechanism, the regulator "hopes to not need more than a week to approve safety updates. Other updates can take longer". They test every change anew it sounds like, at least at first (there was some talk of relaxing reporting requirements if accident rates are as expected, that is, lower than human drivers when using the presently approved assist methods) Seems foreign (heh) to me that a regulator would allow software to drive lethal machinery on public roads without checking that it at least stops at a stop sign. Fining them proportional to turnover makes a lot more sense suddenly. Or maybe a competent regulator, like, prevention rather than after the fact action
- Teever 6mo ago
  Agreed. We need to look at reforming fines in general. Fines should be scaled to income and the value of the vehicle and should exponentially increase for reoffense when in the same catagory of offense.
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  Driverless taxi services are all blowing through venture capitol, so does having a negative income mean that they get a payment, instead of a fine?
fourspacetabs 6mo ago
As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies. Archive link in case of random paywalling like I got: https://archive.ph/xHMDO https://archive.ph/xHMDO
- subhobroto 6mo ago
  > As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies Not necessarily. I went into a bit more detail in my own comment but it might be useful to think that when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, what the effect of those regulations on a person maintaining their own vehicles might be. Consider that your Waymo got ticketed, but you had flashed it with a "no customer telemetry" firmware. Once Waymo gets the ticket, they flag your car as having "unauthorized" software and now the ball's in your court that the reason why your Waymo got ticketed has nothing to do with the telemetry feature that tells Waymo what radio stations you were listening to. Also, when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, the ticket isn't going to cost $500.
  - infecto 6mo ago
    I would hope any type of software modification would put more of the responsibility the owner.
    - MostlyStable 6mo ago
      I'm of the opinion that if one owns an autonomous vehicle, regardless of software modification or not (which should be allowed), then one is fully responsible for it's actions. If one doesn't trust the software provided by the manufacturer, don't buy/use it. Once one chooses to buy it and operate it, then it's that person. Possible exceptions would be in the case that, after purchase, the manufacturer pushes a software update that meaningfully changes the behavior in such a way that it causes issues. In that case, both A) the manufacturer should be responsible and B) the owner should have the option to get some kind of compensation.
subhobroto 6mo ago
UPDATE (can't respond to the two subcomments below due to post throttling, so I'm updating this comment instead) > the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes @skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator. None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up. > Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does @ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator. I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case. --- > The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer. > Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones. These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it. Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly. I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers. In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles. If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.
- fourspacetabs 6mo ago
  Not sure I agree. The clear boundary here to me is who owns and is operating the vehicle. Waymo both owns and operates their vehicles, it’s a taxi service, you wouldn’t say a Waymo rider is operating a vehicle and therefore deserves the ticket. Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does. When that happens someday, then the ticket would go to the owner/operator of the vehicle - whoever bought the car. If you get a ticket due to something dumb your personally owned Waymo did, wouldn’t you pursue that case against Waymo separately, the same way you’d pursue Hyundai for selling you a car whose engine blew up after 50k miles?
callc 6mo ago
I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future. The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society. The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
- loeg 6mo ago
  > If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probation-west-portal-crash/ https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati... The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
  - Aachen 6mo ago
    Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life? What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence") This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence Edit: > She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal. This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
    - qwe----3 6mo ago
dotcoma 6mo ago
It’s about time!
School-Cotton 6mo ago
That is great, they should also start ticketing human-driven cars that violate traffic laws too!
crazygringo 6mo ago
Ticketing is a weird thing to do with driverless cars. If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely. If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold. If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is. Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks. I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense. EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.
- delfinom 6mo ago
  Ok, but why are AVs getting a break on the same tickets a human gets no "low frequency threshold" for them to be allowed. If a AV runs a red light or a stop sign, it should be the same penalty, period. If AV companies want to avoid the tickets, they can make their claimed superior drivers avoid violating the law.
  - crazygringo 6mo ago
    No, you're missing the point. If an AV is regularly running red lights or stop signs, it should be a much worse penalty. It shouldn't be permitted to operate at all. It shouldn't just be given occasional tickets. Tickets are not the right enforcement mechanism.
nallana 6mo ago
They haven’t been all this time? Damn — what a time to be a robot
- morkalork 6mo ago
  I guess it's like patenents (when it's the same thing but comouter) or piracy (but it's model training at a FAANG), where tech just gets a free pass.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
HeavyStorm 6mo ago
_begins_? Like, before, they wouldn't get tickets?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- hoppyhoppy2 6mo ago
  Yes, and there's an example towards the end of the article.
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  Moving violations are issued to the driver, in person, so there hasn't really been a mechanism for issuing them to an operator.
kylehotchkiss 6mo ago
maybe Tesla can put that weird robot that connects the charging connector to the car to use by building a robot that can give the police a hand to place the ticket into
SilverElfin 6mo ago
I don’t disagree with needing some sort of consequence for bad driverless actions. But I distrust the motivation. Maybe California is just looking for more revenue sources after rampantly mismanaging their state and letting corruption and fraud continue.
cowlby 6mo ago
Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly. So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
- WhyIsItAlwaysHN 6mo ago
  Tolls, revenue taxes, ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better.
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    >ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better. That sort of stuff might work on a bunch of peasants since you can screw them individually for small enough amounts it doesn't meet the threshold for political pushback but it won't fly against a few megacorps who do self driving fleets.
- kajman 6mo ago
  Fix the issue quickly, or optimize to the point where revenue gained from breaking the law exceeds the fine. Last I read they were holding steady on "passengers want us to pull into bikelanes to drop-off" in California.
- pokstad 6mo ago
  Probably higher city/state taxes. A police officer making over $200k a year with a pension isn’t making most of their salary from traffic tickets.
  - bilbo0s 6mo ago
    At the same time, there are not many cops making USD200K per annum in my municipality. And it's in flyover country, where everyone is clamoring for lower taxes. So I think it'd be a bit naive to think politicians wanting to score easy points with voters in cities, and even states, won't take the opportunity to extract a bit of revenue out of Big Tech. Not saying it's right. Just saying that's how local politics work.
baby 6mo ago
This is weird
ctoth 6mo ago
What's gonna really be funny is the first time a state legislates that an AV company has to keep a bug in their software to maintain a municipal income flow.
tallowen 6mo ago
Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case. Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws. - A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit - It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law. It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior. https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic
- BoorishBears 6mo ago
  In SF it's legal for taxies to do pickups/drop-offs in bike lanes I haven't seen any evidence Waymo does it anywhere illegal "just because rideshares do"
  - scottbez1 6mo ago
    This is false. It is only legal in the rare event that a passenger requires curb-side access for accessibility/ADA reasons; any other use is still illegal. To quote SFMTA taxi training: Only drop off in a separated bike lane if you have disabled or elderly customers who require direct access to the curb  You may only pick up in a separated bike lane if the dispatcher tells you that the customer is disabled and must be picked up at a location that is next to a separated bike lane. Taxi drivers often intentionally misstate this regulation because it’s more annoying to follow the law and find a legal place to stop so they pretend they are allowed to use bike lanes for any reason.
    - BoorishBears 6mo ago
      Woah you're being pretty misleading! That's for a separated bike lane, and Waymo doesn't even seem capable of doing it: that'd typically involve driving over/between the plastic bollards separating the lane... Waymo doesn't seem to be willing to drive on the wrong side of bollards and I've never seen a taxi do it either. - For non-separated bike lanes it's still a last resort, but it's allowed for all passengers not just the disabled. > Bicycle Safety > Passenger Loading: Non-Separated Bike Lanes >  May enter a non-separated bike lane with caution to drop off all customers (disabled and non-disabled)  Using bike lanes as an absolutely last resort [emphasis theirs, not mine] Waymo doesn't seem to do it when there are other options close nearby either, given the gaps in allowed pick up/drop off locations they offer by bike lanes - It would seem you're intentionally misstating the situation to villainize the driverless vehicles that otherwise l generally respect riders more than anyone else on the road... Actually weirdly enough, you had to read what I wrote to post this right? This is the same training doc you used? https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2023/03/2022_dec_new-driver_on-boarding-mona_20180618_-linked_video-r2.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... Sperated bike lanes are illustrated and come after what I quoted :/
Avi-D-coder 6mo ago
Laws should be loser for autonomous vehicles with good safety records. No one is protected by preventing waymos from making rolling stops, and driving like a human Uber driver.
TheCoreh 6mo ago
I'm honestly surprised they weren't before
chrismcb 6mo ago
"begin" you mean they haven't been doing that already? That seems wrong
tomwheeler 6mo ago
How do the police pull over a driverless vehicle? Who hands over the license and registration? How do you get it to sign the ticket?
- amelius 6mo ago
  You send robocop.
- tim333 6mo ago
  Dunno what it's like in Cali but in the UK nearly all tickets are generated by automatic cameras and arrive in the post to the registered keeper of the vehicle.
gigel82 6mo ago
If there aren't serious consequences for driverless cars committing crimes (I mean jail time for executives serious), what's to stop someone for starting a hitman business? We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!
ninalanyon 6mo ago
Why have they not been doing this already?
outside1234 6mo ago
We should start charging them payroll taxes too per hour
artemihq 6mo ago
seems like real-word RL for AV. why not?
jollymonATX 6mo ago
Why was this not already happening?
willbeddow 6mo ago
Seems good. I'm a big Waymo user (344 rides) and love it, but I think they violate both traffic laws and common-sense courtesies of traffic in ways not captured by safety / crash statistics. Tickets probably are a great signal for ways the model needs to be improved. For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a much quieter side street that an Uber driver will always use. I suspect (but have no idea), a lot of these low-level annoyances might be invisible to someone only looking at aggregated crash statistics, ride times, etc. In many ways, I suspect the AI future might be better in many of the ways we can measure, but worse in those which aren't legible to statistics.
- altmanaltman 6mo ago
  Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    There's no external public visibility into it, so other than wilbeddow writing on HN, how would anyone else know about this issue? I have the opposite problem, where the Waymo takes the legal option on an unbusy street, making the route a lot longer, rather than making an illegal U-turn that a human driver would do, when there's zero traffic or pedestrians it could remotely possibly run into. Which is also not captured in the statistics.
  - disillusioned 6mo ago
    I've actually thought of a much more dystopian idea: that Waymos could be technically used as roving traffic cameras, and report on the human drivers around them. They absolutely have strong enough telemetry systems to be able to determine things like excessive speeding, dangerous lane changes, red light running, etc., and their imaging systems could probably pick up a license plate with little additional modification... it's obviously not great from the perspective of general optics and morale, but it would surprise me if no one had floated basically WayNarc as a business model...
timoth3y 6mo ago
This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways. 1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.) 2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  A more pragmatic metric would be comparing deaths/mile for drivered cars against deaths/mile of driverless cars.
alistairSH 6mo ago
Just now? Why the hell haven’t they all along?
AppleAtCha 6mo ago
I do not live in California and am not up to speed on this issue, but as a casual observer I am shocked that they were allowed on the road without being ticketed for violations like any other vehicle operator.
- apublicfrog 6mo ago
  Completely agree. How is it possible they issued these permits (years ago it seems) without having this infrastructure in place?
- kjkjadksj 6mo ago
  Scooter companies are allowed to violate ada putting the scooters all over the sidewalk where there isn’t 3ft of space to pass them.
- socalgal2 6mo ago
  Any other vehicle operator is also rarely ticketed in California.
giantg2 6mo ago
They should automate the fines by requiring the cars to send the video for processing through an enforcement program. Self-driving, self-ticketing. Maybe that would help force manufacturers to improve quality and not hide as much.
oomuinio 6mo ago
[dead]
indymike 6mo ago
Why were we not doing this already?
mamman777 6mo ago
But I think the manufacturers should be hold responsible not the customers
burgerone 6mo ago
I hope fees increase massively to incentivise change
conartist6 6mo ago
If the cars can incur liability, manslaughter would be next
1970-01-01 6mo ago
Good luck. This is going to be faceless machine v. faceless machine. I can't think of anything more useless in terms of fixing actual needs of society. In fact, I expect it to lead to shady business. Example: Waymos are all paid up at this intersection so traffic is allowed to safely ignore the rules for this month. Tesla Cybercab is still fighting us, so we continue to ticket them.
drivebyhooting 6mo ago
The cars are programmed to intentionally, violate the rules. That’s the only way to drive effectively. Just two examples: gap finding and turning left on a busy intersection.

326 points by geox 6mo ago

zdw 6mo ago

Ideally the fees would be similar to the Norway model, where some tickets are tied to the income of the driver, in this case the pre-tax earnings of the company that created the driverless car.

mathcartney 6mo ago
I think this could be a good compromise. Could have a floor value but the ceiling can vary accordingly.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
Assuming you divide it down to the earnings per car, that makes perfect sense. Of course right now they aren't making any profit at all, and by the time it is relevant it is likely that the cars will commit substantially no violations at all.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
cma 6mo ago
Isn't Norway only for drunk driving? Finland has it for massive speed excesses, but it is based on net taxable income taking out business expenses for taxi drivers, and Waymo is still negative. If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector. But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.
Aachen 6mo ago
That can make sense (opinions differ) for individuals, but it's not like the company is advertising with "we get you there at 1.2x legal speed". They're not competing on that; they're not choosing to do this on purpose like an individual might choose to speed (for example because of economic incentives if their hourly price is high) If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway
- golem14 6mo ago
  I think a rich person would then do the rational thing and hire a cheap driver who also owns and operates their car. Noone sane would be willing to assume basically unlimited liability for someone else's software. Maybe that's good thing - some work for humans after the robots take over, albeit as human legal shields ;)
- preinheimer 6mo ago
  They may not advertise “getting you there at 1.2x legal speed” but the sooner they drop you off, the sooner they can get another fare. Over a whole fleet it will add up to changing the size of the required fleet. If getting a ticket one ride in a thousand is cheaper than deploying another 2000 cars to make up for the increased trip time I’d expect them to keep getting tickets. I’m also not sure they don’t do it on purpose. Tesla self driving has an aggressive mode willing to speed and roll through stop signs. Those were deliberate, law breaking, choices.
  - Aachen 6mo ago
    Oh, I actually read an article about that this morning in bed but didn't imagine regulators would approve a mode that is programmed to ignore laws. Not sure how it works where you're from but in the Netherlands, where Tesla did the approval process to subsequently apply for an EU license for using the drive assistance mechanism, the regulator "hopes to not need more than a week to approve safety updates. Other updates can take longer". They test every change anew it sounds like, at least at first (there was some talk of relaxing reporting requirements if accident rates are as expected, that is, lower than human drivers when using the presently approved assist methods) Seems foreign (heh) to me that a regulator would allow software to drive lethal machinery on public roads without checking that it at least stops at a stop sign. Fining them proportional to turnover makes a lot more sense suddenly. Or maybe a competent regulator, like, prevention rather than after the fact action
Teever 6mo ago
Agreed. We need to look at reforming fines in general. Fines should be scaled to income and the value of the vehicle and should exponentially increase for reoffense when in the same catagory of offense.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
Driverless taxi services are all blowing through venture capitol, so does having a negative income mean that they get a payment, instead of a fine?

fourspacetabs 6mo ago

As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies. Archive link in case of random paywalling like I got: https://archive.ph/xHMDO https://archive.ph/xHMDO

subhobroto 6mo ago
> As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies Not necessarily. I went into a bit more detail in my own comment but it might be useful to think that when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, what the effect of those regulations on a person maintaining their own vehicles might be. Consider that your Waymo got ticketed, but you had flashed it with a "no customer telemetry" firmware. Once Waymo gets the ticket, they flag your car as having "unauthorized" software and now the ball's in your court that the reason why your Waymo got ticketed has nothing to do with the telemetry feature that tells Waymo what radio stations you were listening to. Also, when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, the ticket isn't going to cost $500.
- infecto 6mo ago
  I would hope any type of software modification would put more of the responsibility the owner.
  - MostlyStable 6mo ago
    I'm of the opinion that if one owns an autonomous vehicle, regardless of software modification or not (which should be allowed), then one is fully responsible for it's actions. If one doesn't trust the software provided by the manufacturer, don't buy/use it. Once one chooses to buy it and operate it, then it's that person. Possible exceptions would be in the case that, after purchase, the manufacturer pushes a software update that meaningfully changes the behavior in such a way that it causes issues. In that case, both A) the manufacturer should be responsible and B) the owner should have the option to get some kind of compensation.

subhobroto 6mo ago

UPDATE (can't respond to the two subcomments below due to post throttling, so I'm updating this comment instead) > the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes @skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator. None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up. > Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does @ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator. I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case. --- > The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer. > Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones. These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it. Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly. I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers. In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles. If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.

fourspacetabs 6mo ago
Not sure I agree. The clear boundary here to me is who owns and is operating the vehicle. Waymo both owns and operates their vehicles, it’s a taxi service, you wouldn’t say a Waymo rider is operating a vehicle and therefore deserves the ticket. Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does. When that happens someday, then the ticket would go to the owner/operator of the vehicle - whoever bought the car. If you get a ticket due to something dumb your personally owned Waymo did, wouldn’t you pursue that case against Waymo separately, the same way you’d pursue Hyundai for selling you a car whose engine blew up after 50k miles?

callc 6mo ago

I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future. The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society. The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?

loeg 6mo ago
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probation-west-portal-crash/ https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati... The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
- Aachen 6mo ago
  Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life? What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence") This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence Edit: > She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal. This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
  - qwe----3 6mo ago

dotcoma 6mo ago

It’s about time!

School-Cotton 6mo ago

That is great, they should also start ticketing human-driven cars that violate traffic laws too!

crazygringo 6mo ago

Ticketing is a weird thing to do with driverless cars. If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely. If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold. If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is. Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks. I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense. EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.

delfinom 6mo ago
Ok, but why are AVs getting a break on the same tickets a human gets no "low frequency threshold" for them to be allowed. If a AV runs a red light or a stop sign, it should be the same penalty, period. If AV companies want to avoid the tickets, they can make their claimed superior drivers avoid violating the law.
- crazygringo 6mo ago
  No, you're missing the point. If an AV is regularly running red lights or stop signs, it should be a much worse penalty. It shouldn't be permitted to operate at all. It shouldn't just be given occasional tickets. Tickets are not the right enforcement mechanism.

nallana 6mo ago

They haven’t been all this time? Damn — what a time to be a robot

morkalork 6mo ago
I guess it's like patenents (when it's the same thing but comouter) or piracy (but it's model training at a FAANG), where tech just gets a free pass.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

HeavyStorm 6mo ago

_begins_? Like, before, they wouldn't get tickets?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
hoppyhoppy2 6mo ago
Yes, and there's an example towards the end of the article.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
Moving violations are issued to the driver, in person, so there hasn't really been a mechanism for issuing them to an operator.

kylehotchkiss 6mo ago

maybe Tesla can put that weird robot that connects the charging connector to the car to use by building a robot that can give the police a hand to place the ticket into

SilverElfin 6mo ago

I don’t disagree with needing some sort of consequence for bad driverless actions. But I distrust the motivation. Maybe California is just looking for more revenue sources after rampantly mismanaging their state and letting corruption and fraud continue.

cowlby 6mo ago

Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly. So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN 6mo ago
Tolls, revenue taxes, ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better.
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  >ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better. That sort of stuff might work on a bunch of peasants since you can screw them individually for small enough amounts it doesn't meet the threshold for political pushback but it won't fly against a few megacorps who do self driving fleets.
kajman 6mo ago
Fix the issue quickly, or optimize to the point where revenue gained from breaking the law exceeds the fine. Last I read they were holding steady on "passengers want us to pull into bikelanes to drop-off" in California.
pokstad 6mo ago
Probably higher city/state taxes. A police officer making over $200k a year with a pension isn’t making most of their salary from traffic tickets.
- bilbo0s 6mo ago
  At the same time, there are not many cops making USD200K per annum in my municipality. And it's in flyover country, where everyone is clamoring for lower taxes. So I think it'd be a bit naive to think politicians wanting to score easy points with voters in cities, and even states, won't take the opportunity to extract a bit of revenue out of Big Tech. Not saying it's right. Just saying that's how local politics work.

baby 6mo ago

This is weird

ctoth 6mo ago

What's gonna really be funny is the first time a state legislates that an AV company has to keep a bug in their software to maintain a municipal income flow.

tallowen 6mo ago

Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case. Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws. - A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit - It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law. It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior. https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic

BoorishBears 6mo ago
In SF it's legal for taxies to do pickups/drop-offs in bike lanes I haven't seen any evidence Waymo does it anywhere illegal "just because rideshares do"
- scottbez1 6mo ago
  This is false. It is only legal in the rare event that a passenger requires curb-side access for accessibility/ADA reasons; any other use is still illegal. To quote SFMTA taxi training: Only drop off in a separated bike lane if you have disabled or elderly customers who require direct access to the curb  You may only pick up in a separated bike lane if the dispatcher tells you that the customer is disabled and must be picked up at a location that is next to a separated bike lane. Taxi drivers often intentionally misstate this regulation because it’s more annoying to follow the law and find a legal place to stop so they pretend they are allowed to use bike lanes for any reason.
  - BoorishBears 6mo ago
    Woah you're being pretty misleading! That's for a separated bike lane, and Waymo doesn't even seem capable of doing it: that'd typically involve driving over/between the plastic bollards separating the lane... Waymo doesn't seem to be willing to drive on the wrong side of bollards and I've never seen a taxi do it either. - For non-separated bike lanes it's still a last resort, but it's allowed for all passengers not just the disabled. > Bicycle Safety > Passenger Loading: Non-Separated Bike Lanes >  May enter a non-separated bike lane with caution to drop off all customers (disabled and non-disabled)  Using bike lanes as an absolutely last resort [emphasis theirs, not mine] Waymo doesn't seem to do it when there are other options close nearby either, given the gaps in allowed pick up/drop off locations they offer by bike lanes - It would seem you're intentionally misstating the situation to villainize the driverless vehicles that otherwise l generally respect riders more than anyone else on the road... Actually weirdly enough, you had to read what I wrote to post this right? This is the same training doc you used? https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2023/03/2022_dec_new-driver_on-boarding-mona_20180618_-linked_video-r2.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume... Sperated bike lanes are illustrated and come after what I quoted :/

Avi-D-coder 6mo ago

Laws should be loser for autonomous vehicles with good safety records. No one is protected by preventing waymos from making rolling stops, and driving like a human Uber driver.

TheCoreh 6mo ago

I'm honestly surprised they weren't before

chrismcb 6mo ago

"begin" you mean they haven't been doing that already? That seems wrong

tomwheeler 6mo ago

How do the police pull over a driverless vehicle? Who hands over the license and registration? How do you get it to sign the ticket?

amelius 6mo ago
You send robocop.
tim333 6mo ago
Dunno what it's like in Cali but in the UK nearly all tickets are generated by automatic cameras and arrive in the post to the registered keeper of the vehicle.

gigel82 6mo ago

If there aren't serious consequences for driverless cars committing crimes (I mean jail time for executives serious), what's to stop someone for starting a hitman business? We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!

ninalanyon 6mo ago

Why have they not been doing this already?

outside1234 6mo ago

We should start charging them payroll taxes too per hour

artemihq 6mo ago

seems like real-word RL for AV. why not?

jollymonATX 6mo ago

Why was this not already happening?

willbeddow 6mo ago

Seems good. I'm a big Waymo user (344 rides) and love it, but I think they violate both traffic laws and common-sense courtesies of traffic in ways not captured by safety / crash statistics. Tickets probably are a great signal for ways the model needs to be improved. For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a much quieter side street that an Uber driver will always use. I suspect (but have no idea), a lot of these low-level annoyances might be invisible to someone only looking at aggregated crash statistics, ride times, etc. In many ways, I suspect the AI future might be better in many of the ways we can measure, but worse in those which aren't legible to statistics.

altmanaltman 6mo ago
Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."
- fragmede 6mo ago
  There's no external public visibility into it, so other than wilbeddow writing on HN, how would anyone else know about this issue? I have the opposite problem, where the Waymo takes the legal option on an unbusy street, making the route a lot longer, rather than making an illegal U-turn that a human driver would do, when there's zero traffic or pedestrians it could remotely possibly run into. Which is also not captured in the statistics.
- disillusioned 6mo ago
  I've actually thought of a much more dystopian idea: that Waymos could be technically used as roving traffic cameras, and report on the human drivers around them. They absolutely have strong enough telemetry systems to be able to determine things like excessive speeding, dangerous lane changes, red light running, etc., and their imaging systems could probably pick up a license plate with little additional modification... it's obviously not great from the perspective of general optics and morale, but it would surprise me if no one had floated basically WayNarc as a business model...

timoth3y 6mo ago

This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways. 1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.) 2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.

WalterBright 6mo ago
A more pragmatic metric would be comparing deaths/mile for drivered cars against deaths/mile of driverless cars.

alistairSH 6mo ago

Just now? Why the hell haven’t they all along?

AppleAtCha 6mo ago

I do not live in California and am not up to speed on this issue, but as a casual observer I am shocked that they were allowed on the road without being ticketed for violations like any other vehicle operator.

apublicfrog 6mo ago
Completely agree. How is it possible they issued these permits (years ago it seems) without having this infrastructure in place?
kjkjadksj 6mo ago
Scooter companies are allowed to violate ada putting the scooters all over the sidewalk where there isn’t 3ft of space to pass them.
socalgal2 6mo ago
Any other vehicle operator is also rarely ticketed in California.

giantg2 6mo ago

They should automate the fines by requiring the cars to send the video for processing through an enforcement program. Self-driving, self-ticketing. Maybe that would help force manufacturers to improve quality and not hide as much.

oomuinio 6mo ago

[dead]

indymike 6mo ago

Why were we not doing this already?

mamman777 6mo ago

But I think the manufacturers should be hold responsible not the customers

burgerone 6mo ago

I hope fees increase massively to incentivise change

conartist6 6mo ago

If the cars can incur liability, manslaughter would be next

1970-01-01 6mo ago

Good luck. This is going to be faceless machine v. faceless machine. I can't think of anything more useless in terms of fixing actual needs of society. In fact, I expect it to lead to shady business. Example: Waymos are all paid up at this intersection so traffic is allowed to safely ignore the rules for this month. Tesla Cybercab is still fighting us, so we continue to ticket them.

drivebyhooting 6mo ago

The cars are programmed to intentionally, violate the rules. That’s the only way to drive effectively. Just two examples: gap finding and turning left on a busy intersection.