California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...

The standard for human drivers is through the floor.

I wish this were true. Often they get off with a light punishment, or no punishment at all.

If only! "10 Days In Jail For Drunken Driver Who Killed Cyclist Bobby Cann" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170126/old-town/ryne-san-h...

Same as if someone were driving, if a person just jumps in front of your car while you're driving under the limit/sober/etc, you aren't at fault, so the AV should also not be at fault if it couldn't reasonably avoid the harm. You balance these things, benefit to society vs harm to society, and you come to an acceptable tradeoff.

More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level

Turning that into a monetary cost would change the ethics slightly, but it wouldn't be a monumental shift

They get their licenses pulled statewide [1]. Cruise's single negligent manslaughter event carried more consequence than dozens of human cases combined.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...

It’s the same cost/benefit we accept under current rules. Why have cars that can go 3x the speed limit? Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them? Why not fine logistics companies if one of their drivers breaks the law? And so on… Because it’s worth it

It won't. The majority of fatalities are caused by drugs and alcohol.

> The last hurdle is regulatory.

Indeed. Compare the USAs DUI laws with any other first world country.

How’d you arrive at this conclusion? Why would fleet providers accept regrettable losses? Wouldn’t the last hurdle be technical?

> The question is how to achieve fairness

What does that have to do with automotive safety?

Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.

1. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...

The trickiest part will be figuring out how many dollars per mile driven is an acceptable cost of business..

I'd probably reserve the whole executives to jail thing to cases where you can prove negligence or something.

My understanding is that that is already the legal situation?

A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.

The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#

The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.

I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.

Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.

If AVs will save lives, we need to be sure we aren't punitive to the point of making them disappear.

1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.

2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.

If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.

Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.

There is essentially nothing to be gained from doing this because it will not in either case be manufacturer; it will be an insurance company.

If the liability is paid by the vehicle owner's insurance then things work as they do now. You buy a car, insure it, if there is a liability there is an insurance claim and then the victim has someone to pay them for their injuries. Meanwhile the manufacturers still have a financial incentive to make safer cars because buyers want neither accident prone vehicles as the one they use nor high insurance rates. The insurance rates in particular are in direct competition with the car payment for the customer's available income.

Whereas if you try to put the liability on the manufacturer, several stupider things happen.

First, they're just going to buy insurance anyway, but now the insurance cost has to be front-loaded into the purchase price, which increases costs because now you're paying car loan interest on money to cover insurance five and ten years from now, when you otherwise wouldn't have needed to pay the premiums until the time comes.

Second, what happens to cars from manufacturers who no longer exist? They can't continue paying for insurance if they're bankrupt, so you need it to be someone else. Worse, if a company produces a vehicle which is unsafe, that will tend to cause them to go bankrupt. But then people still have them, and would continue to operate them if they're allowed to point victims at the bankrupt manufacturer, whereas the incentive you want is for the premiums on those cars to go up for the vehicle owners so that they stop operating them.

These people want to play god with our lives but at the same time move fast and break things. Look at software quality anywhere, it's a mess and only about to get much worse.

We should not let them. Jail time for anyone involved in any of the decision making process, applied at scale with the number of vehicles and deaths.

Why should the standards be any different? They want to change the status quo with tech only so they can get paid and extort us with yet more subscriptions.

AVs will never substantially reduce road deaths. They will optimize to just being slightly better than human, but fail in new and more unexpected ways. There is not enough incentive for them to make it safer.

I hate this part, I don't think it is good for society. I think UPS gets lots and lots of parking tickets, and pays them as COB.

Maybe they should have "fix it" tickets, like they get for a burned-out headlight. Except they need a bug to be opened and fixed.

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.

Obviously, we should also have the option to pull vehicles that are brazenly ignoring the law and just eating the cost of the tickets. Just like we do with drivers who do that. But that should be the second line of defense if regular monetary fines (tickets) fail

I have to stop reading the rest of the comment right there.

If the violations are intentional and easily fixable is an incredibly loaded presumption to start any type of conversation, dialogue, or debate. To the point, asking the question 'how do we qualify intention? How are we measuring difficulty of fix? Costs of payroll, computer, deployment, and potential regression testing? What about the very nature of the context that led up to it? Did an external 3rd party cutoff a robotaxi and require that the robotaxi veer into the oncoming traffic lane, bc sensors indicated it was the best decision to avoid a collision, prioritizing safety and human life over traffic law?

What happens when following traffic law statistically leads to a greater risk of loss of life over violating the law?

I must insist we move the dialogue upstream to reality as-is, and there is plenty to discuss there.

I will in good faith issue a starting point: how should we measure the robotaxi driver license wrt suspension? Do we issue a point system that is averaged across the fleet, e.g. violations/car before suspending all operations until licensure evaluation? Personally I think that is a fair starting point amd am completely open minded to alternative views.

The biggest reason for the difference between Autonomous vehicles and peanut butter is that with autonomous vehicles, we already have a compliance system in place....cops. It's not designed for autonomous vehicles, and you are correct that it's not the way you would design it for the ground up for autonomous vehicles, but it's far better to accept the imperfections than to build some new, separate compliance and monitoring system on top of the existing one. The benefits aren't large enough to justify it.

In the far future when the vast majority of vehicles are autonomous? Sure, probably worth scrapping to a new system (by then, my guess is that issues are rare enough to just not have a system at all and just use the legal system in the rare cases of large issues).

Until then, ticketing in the case of traffic violations seems fine and good enough to me.

How would your proposal work for personal driverless cars, with/without custom modifications? ie. if my personal car commits violation on its way to pick me up

There is an existing infrastructure for ticketing by license plate, payment processing, collection, etc.

You’re describing changes to the law, which require a bunch of procedural hurdles. It’s much easier for the DMV to just promulgate new rules that tap into existing infrastructure, as they did here.

Also, how is the government supposed to assess whether these violations are intentional or not? Tickets are strict liability (you get the ticket if you do it regardless of intent, reasons, etc.) because it is easy to administer.

Why pass a thousand new laws when the existing laws have an enforcement mechanism?

What I worry more about is a future where private car ownership seems impractical when there is a large fleet of autonomous Ubers out there to handle the day-to-days, which start out cheap. Once society reaches a point of dependence, will there be enough competition to keep the price down, or will we see consumers of the services get squeezed as companies ratchet up prices to increase margins.

I haven't seen any evidence Waymo does it anywhere illegal "just because rideshares do"

For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit.

It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order: First-come, first-served; if order is unclear, yield to the right. Always wait for the intersection to be completely clear before proceeding.

That sounds nice and neat and it looks good on paper. It was surely at least a very easy system to describe and then write down.

But reality is very different: 4 way stops are an elaborate dance of drivers executing moves simultaneously and without conflict. For instance: Two opposite, straight-going cars can proceed concurrently works fine. All 4 directions can turn right, concurrently. Opposing left turns at the same time? Sure! While others are also turning right? Why not.

When there's room for a move and it creates no conflict, then that move works fine.

We all were taught how these intersections are supposed to work, but then reality ultimately shows us how they do work. And the dance works. It's efficient. Nobody gets ticketed for safely dancing that dance. (And broadly-speaking, a timid law-abiding driver who doesn't know the dance will be let through...eventually.)

The main problem with the dance is that it's difficult to adequately describe and write down and thus codify in law.

But maybe we should try, anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.

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.

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?

Perhaps they could sell the car to a different taxi service, though?

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.

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

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.