Self-driving cars in California will reportedly not be subject to traffic tickets, despite an increase in reports of accidents involving self-driving cars.
Ann NBC Bay Area Police can't ticket self-driving cars because of a loophole in Golden State law that says only drivers can be ticketed for misbehavior on the road, according to a report.
“A citation for a moving violation will not be issued if:” [autonomous vehicle] are operating in driverless mode,” an internal memo from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, obtained by NBC, said.
The moving violations Scott mentioned include speeding, running red lights and reckless driving, but self-driving cars will still be subject to parking fines.
“Technology is evolving rapidly, sometimes faster than laws and regulations can adapt to change,” Scott added.
Representatives for the San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.
san francisco standard The city said in a June report that one of the reasons the city hasn't cited self-driving cars for moving violations is because no drivers have actually cited them.
“When you're a police officer on the scene and there's a vehicle that violates vehicle laws, which happens every day in San Francisco, who do you hand over the charges to?” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA's transportation director, told the magazine. Ta.
“More work is needed to clarify what happens if self-driving cars break the law.”
Meanwhile, Texas and Arizona (testing grounds for self-driving cars by GM subsidiary Cruise, Tesla, Google's Waymo, and others) have already passed laws that make holding companies that operate self-driving cars liable for driving violations. There is.
Despite a series of worrying incidents involving self-driving cars, California has yet to follow suit.
In October, the Jaws of Life had to rescue a woman who was mowed down by two cars, one of which was a Cruise Self-Driving, on a San Francisco road.
The car driven by the person who hit the woman fled the scene, but there were no passengers in the cruiser, leaving authorities to figure out what happened.
Since Cruise was forced to suspend operations due to the accident, it has been working to rebuild itself while cutting costs.
The company cut more than 900 jobs, a quarter of its workforce, last month, a day after it announced nine key leaders were no longer with the company amid an ongoing investigation into the October crash. confirmed.
A few months ago, a Waymo self-driving car struck and killed a small dog during a test drive in San Francisco.
In the fatal crash on May 21, “a test driver was in the driver's seat,” but the vehicle's automated driving system (ADS) was “operating in autonomous mode,” the report said. Online DMV Report.
Just last month, as part of a multi-year investigation into Elon Musk's cars by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, virtually every Tesla on the road was recalled due to regulators' concerns that the “Autopilot” system was unsafe. Ta.
Musk was initially the biggest person to publicly popularize the idea of cars driving. Promising immediate “fully autonomous driving” In 2016.
The Autopilot system allows the Tesla to self-pilot, accelerate, and brake, but requires a driver in the front seat. Tesla has been updating its software but insists the system is secure.
But Austin, Texas-based Tesla is not as advanced as other companies that have begun testing cars with empty driver seats on city streets.
