New Jersey bill could prevent Tesla robotaxis from operating
The debate over the safety of autonomous vehicles, focused on sensing technology, has escalated to the legislative field in New Jersey. The central discussion revolves around the sufficiency of cameras as the only system to safely replace human drivers, or whether there is a need for additional sensors such as lidar and radar for reliable navigation. Tesla has invested billions in the belief that its artificial intelligence and cameras are adequate, while most other major autonomous vehicle developers take a more robust, multi-sensor approach.
Recently, legislators from the state of New Jersey intervened in this debate, proposing state legislation to regulate the issue.
A bill, expected to be voted on later this year, would establish the obligation for companies that wish to operate fully autonomous vehicles in the state to use, in addition to cameras, two other sensing technologies, such as lidar and radar. If approved, New Jersey would become the first state to enact such a hardware requirement into law, following a similar proposal in New York. In practice, the measure would prevent Tesla’s Robotaxi system, which relies exclusively on cameras, from operating in New Jersey unless the company modifies its hardware.
Democratic State Senator Andrew Zwicker, the bill’s lead author, clarified his position by stating: “I’m not against Tesla, I’m for safety in New Jersey.”
Zwicker, who is also a physicist at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, reported being impressed by a ride in a Waymo robotaxi in Phoenix, which convinced him of the transformative potential of autonomous vehicles in transportation.
He argues that technology can drastically expand mobility, reduce traffic deaths and increase transportation accessibility. However, Zwicker emphasizes the need for cautious implementation in the country’s most densely populated state.
“At this point, I do not consider that the evidence is sufficient that a single sensor with software can manage situations that humans can,” said the senator. “Can we get to that point? Maybe. But we’re not there yet.”
The legislative proposal establishes a three-year pilot program to regulate the testing and deployment of fully autonomous vehicles in New Jersey. Companies would be required to employ multiple sensor technologies, report specific accidents, and obtain state authorization before beginning fully autonomous commercial services. They must also complete a minimum of 50,000 miles of supervised testing within New Jersey without serious incident before operating without the presence of a safety driver.
New Jersey’s Innovative Approach to Robotaxi Regulation
While other state discussions about autonomous vehicles have focused on operational safety, oversight and potential job losses, New Jersey is looking to innovate by legislating the construction of the vehicles themselves.
Learn more: Waymo has almost a thousand robotaxis parked in Arizona waiting for authorization to circulate
The multiple sensor requirement represents the bill’s most significant provision, with implications that transcend Tesla. Elon Musk has long argued that cameras, combined with increasingly advanced artificial intelligence, are the most effective and cost-effective way to operate autonomous vehicles. He argues that, just as humans navigate using vision alone, a sufficiently developed AI should be able to replicate this ability. The elimination of lidar and radar also drastically reduces hardware costs, making the production of robotaxis for large-scale deployment more viable.
Musk even argued that adding more sensors could actually decrease security by forcing software to reconcile potentially conflicting information. “Lidar and radar reduce safety due to the dispute between the sensors. If the lidars/radars disagree with the cameras, which one prevails?”, he wrote on a social network last year. “We disable radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras win.”
However, most of the autonomous vehicle industry disagrees with this view. Companies like Waymo and Zoox combine cameras with lidar and radar, arguing that each sensing technology has distinct strengths and weaknesses. Cameras capture rich visual details, enabling recognition of colors, signs, lanes, and pedestrians, but may struggle in adverse weather conditions, darkness, or bright glare. The radar works best in rain and fog, excelling in measuring the distance and relative speed of nearby objects. Lidar uses lasers to create detailed three-dimensional maps of the vehicle’s environment, being particularly effective in determining the shape and distance of objects.
Rather than relying on a single sensor, these companies seek to combine the strengths of the three technologies, arguing that redundancy increases the safety of autonomous driving. Philip Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and an expert on autonomous vehicle safety, acknowledges that systems based solely on cameras could eventually achieve the capability needed for fully autonomous driving, but he doesn’t believe this is currently a reality.
As Koopman stated, “eyes are better than cameras for many reasons” and “the human brain is fundamentally more powerful than AI because we understand.” While there are scenarios where using cameras alone works well – such as good weather, favorable lighting and less complex roads – he doesn’t consider the technology ready for widespread consumer use.
“To operate 24/7 on most New Jersey public roads today requires lidar,” Koopman said. “It is quite evident that current technology, based solely on cameras, is not sufficient for this challenge.”
Experts and the Future of Regulation in New Jersey
More on this story: MIT Unveils Innovative Lidar Chip That Enhances Autonomous Vehicle Vision and Mapping
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Koopman supports New Jersey’s proposal, although he suggests even more stringent safeguards, such as requiring conventional driving controls (steering wheels and pedals) so that first responders can move disabled vehicles – which would eliminate Cybercabs, which do not have such controls – and limits on the number of autonomous vehicles on the road during the pilot project. This last provision, according to Zwicker, is under consideration.
“The difference between 100 cars and 10,000 cars is stark,” Koopman explained of the scale. When the scale is small, “there just aren’t enough cars for that many weird things to happen to them.” He cited the case of Waymo, which currently operates more than 3,500 commercial robotaxis in 11 US metropolitan areas.
“They never had a problem with flooding and school buses — not because they could handle flooding and school buses,” Koopman said. “But with 100 cars, that just doesn’t happen often.”
Despite the great expectations generated, Tesla currently only has a few unsupervised Robotaxis in operation, mainly in Texas, according to data from Robotaxi Tracker. This suggests that scaling up the camera-only approach hasn’t been as easy as Elon Musk had promised. Last year, he predicted that Tesla would have hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous vehicles in operation by the end of 2026. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The influence of advocacy groups and the Tesla lobby
Many of the bill’s provisions reflect recommendations from SAVE-US, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter regulation of autonomous vehicles. Shua Sanchez, a physicist and national campaigns director at SAVE-US, said the group was created due to Congress’s failure to establish national rules as autonomous vehicle companies expanded their operations to states with dramatically different levels of oversight.
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“California has the best safety standards in the country,” he said. “Texas, Arizona and Georgia have virtually no state oversight.”
Among the organization’s priorities is the need for redundant sensing systems. “We have no problem with Tesla as a company,” Sanchez said. “We have a problem with autonomous vehicles that only use cameras.”
Almost all interested parties sought modifications to the bill. Waymo was successful in removing the requirement for safety drivers in vehicles throughout the pilot project, and Uber advocated for the state to continue to require human drivers for most trips, according to Senator Zwicker.
According to Zwicker, Tesla has been lobbying against the legislation in New Jersey. He said company representatives met with lawmakers to argue that advances in artificial intelligence make additional types of sensors unnecessary. Zwicker, however, said that while the technology has improved, “I’m still not convinced it’s ready to be implemented.”
Public reaction and the divergent national regulatory landscape
The debate went beyond the limits of the state Legislative Assembly. “As written, the legislation imposes restrictions so severe that Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology could not legally operate in New Jersey,” read a Tesla statement to company vehicle owners in the state, encouraging them to contact lawmakers.
Zwicker revealed that his office received about 4,000 emails in a single day. “The message was not about the details of the bill,” he said. “It was that Zwicker was trying to kill your autopilot.”
Zwicker refutes this interpretation, clarifying that the legislation applies only to fully autonomous vehicles operating under the proposed state pilot program, and not to driver assistance systems that still require the presence of a licensed human driver behind the wheel.
More on this story: Amazon Zoox gets approval from NHTSA to operate robotaxis without traditional controls
The dispute in New Jersey reflects a broader gap in the regulation of autonomous vehicles in the United States. Congress has been debating national legislation on the topic for years without, however, approving a comprehensive framework, which has led states to develop their own rules as commercial robotaxi services expand. These services already operate in states like California, Texas, Arizona and Georgia, under drastically different regulatory systems. While California requires extensive licenses for public testing and reporting, it does not specify what technology autonomous vehicles need to obtain them. Texas has taken a much more flexible approach, allowing automakers to certify on their own that their autonomous vehicles are road-ready.
The New Jersey bill raises the possibility that the autonomous vehicle technology used there could be different from that in other states. Zwicker, however, is not concerned about this divergence. “This technology simply does not exist in the Northeast,” he stated. “The goal is to start now, do it safely and earn the public’s trust.”
SAVE-US’s Sanchez views the sensor requirement as a sensible security measure rather than a restriction on innovation. “There are absolutely brilliant people working at Tesla trying to make camera-only autonomy work,” he said. “But they’re trying to do it with one hand tied behind their back.”
