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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?

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

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

The standard for human drivers is through the floor.

In the US, 11 deaths per billion miles driven (or about 47k per year) is currently seen as an OK cost.

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

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

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...

We subsidize driving by somewhat over a trillion dollars annually, mostly due to lax penalties for negligence which shift liability to drivers’ victims[1]. One way to tackle all of these problems would be requiring drivers to cover the full damages.

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...

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV?

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...

The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.

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.

> We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.

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.

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book.

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

> What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?

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

If we consider fairness/retribution/justice then we won't get this future of less road deaths.

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.

We can look to other forms of automation to get a sense of what to do. For example, planes largely fly themselves and a loss of life due to manufacturing errors from the manufacturer would deem them liable for those deaths. Seems like the solution here is large penalties and generally broad disincentives for incurring harm.
What happens if you build a bridge and it breaks?

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.

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.

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.
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.

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

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

They haven’t been all this time? Damn — what a time to be a robot
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.
_begins_? Like, before, they wouldn't get tickets?
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

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!

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
We should start charging them payroll taxes too per hour
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?
That is great, they should also start ticketing human-driven cars that violate traffic laws too!
But I think the manufacturers should be hold responsible not the customers
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.
If the cars can incur liability, manslaughter would be next
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
I hope fees increase massively to incentivise change
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.

It’s about time!
Why have they not been doing this already?
Why were we not doing this already?
Why was this not already happening?
This is weird
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.
I'm honestly surprised they weren't before
seems like real-word RL for AV. why not?
Just now? Why the hell haven’t they all along?