Waymo is Alphabet/Google’s self-driving car project, and has operated driverless taxis in various cities across the U.S. since 2018. While some self-driving cars still feature human operators at the wheel to take responsibility in case of an emergency, Waymo’s latest cars do not have anyone sitting in the front seat. This has provided law enforcement officers with a problem: Who takes responsibility for a self-driving car when it commits a traffic violation?
It’s a question that officials in the Bay Area have yet to find a satisfactory answer to. A recent post from the San Bruno Police Department highlights the regulatory vacuum that driverless cars currently operate in, with the department saying that it stopped a Waymo car making “an illegal U-turn right in front of [officers] at a light.” The officers were conducting DUI checks at the time, and so could quickly stop the car after its illegal maneuver.
However, after officers contacted Waymo to tell the company that one of its cars wasn’t following traffic laws, there wasn’t much else that they could do. The department said that there was no way to issue a ticket to the car as “our citation books don’t have a box for “robot.”
New legislation is being implemented soon
In the post, the department notes that, despite there being some people who “believe that we are being lenient,” a driverless car can’t be given a ticket if there’s no human operator in the front seat. This isn’t an issue that’s unique to Waymo, with officers in San Francisco being left equally confused after pulling over a Cruise driverless car in 2022.
In California, the inability for cops to ticket driverless taxis is only a temporary loophole. A new state law will take effect in July 2026 that hands gives officers the ability to issue notices for traffic violations to the manufacturer of a driverless taxi. It also mandates that all driverless taxis should have a two-way communication system and a dedicated emergency phone line so that officers can communicate with a human operator at the company if necessary.
While Waymo’s autonomous cars have generally managed to steer clear of accidents throughout their operation, they’re evidently not immune to breaking traffic laws every so often. For now, although driverless taxis can get stopped at a DUI checkpoint just like any human driver, there isn’t much that cops can do to punish them.
