For more than a decade, the biggest battle in self-driving cars has been played out in boardrooms and engineering labs. New Jersey now wants to fix it with legislation.
A bill passing the state legislature would force any company running fully self-driving cars in New Jersey to install a camera system and two other road sensing methods, lidar and radar.
Tesla builds its cars with cameras alone. If the bill passes, its Robotaxi could not operate in the state without changing its hardware. The Verge first reported the details.
The measure would make New Jersey the first state to write a sensor mandate into law. A nearly identical bill is already pending next door in New York. If any one passes, other states can follow, and the domino effect will completely reach Elon Musk’s camera-only bet.
What the bill says
This legislation is a Senate committee replacement for Senate Bill 1677, which was received by the Senate Transportation Committee on May 11. Its sponsor is state Senator Andrew Zwicker, a physicist who works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
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Establishing a three-year program to pilot autonomous vehicles, the Department of Transportation decides who gets in.
The law of the senses resides in the fourth category. Every vehicle in the pilot must have a “camera system and two separate sensors” that can detect and track obstacles if the cameras fail. Those systems should handle pedestrian detection, automatic emergency braking, and lane keeping.
In plain words, the camera alone is not enough.
There’s more to the bill that Tesla won’t like. The cars must log data from 30 seconds before any crash, run 50,000 test miles before going self-driving, and carry at least $5m in insurance. They cannot drive in school zones, construction zones, or areas with high pedestrian collision rates.
Still image from ‘Full Self-Driving’
One part takes aim at how these systems are marketed. Auto dealers and manufacturers must provide consumers with a written explanation of what an automatic system component can and cannot do. They cannot market the partial system in a way that explains that the car can drive itself. Violate that law and it counts as consumer fraud under state law.
Tesla sells a driver assistance package it calls Full Self-Driving, which still requires human attention. The naming has drawn lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny for years. New Jersey requires that gap between the label and the truth to be made clear at the point of sale.
Cameras against the world
Musk has invested billions in the idea that cameras and artificial intelligence can do all the work. “We turned off radars in Teslas to increase safety,” he wrote last year. “Cameras to win.” He argues that the accumulation of additional senses creates conflicting signals, a problem he calls sensory conflict.
Almost everyone in the field disagrees. Waymo, the clear market leader, uses cameras alongside lidar and radar, which better deal with fog, rain and darkness. In Europe, one startup is even testing a Level 4 car that uses no AI to drive, relying entirely on sensors and rules.
“Running 24/7 on most public roads in New Jersey today, it requires lidar,” Carnegie Mellon professor Philip Koopman told The Verge. “It is clear that today camera technology alone is not up to the challenge.”
The scoreboard supports him. Tesla is operating a fleet of 42 driverless Robotaxis on public roads in Texas. Waymo has 577 licensed in the same state, and several thousand more in ten US metropolitan areas. Musk has promised hundreds of thousands of Tesla robotaxis by the end of this year.
That hasn’t happened yet.
Not anti-Tesla, said the sponsor
Zwicker rejects the idea that he is targeting one company. “This is not against Tesla,” he told The Verge. “I support the safety of New Jersey.” He became a believer in the technology after riding a Waymo in Phoenix, and was struck by how fast the ride felt. His concern is not the promise but the timeline.
He is not convinced that cameras and software alone can handle everything a human driver can do.
Tesla is not waiting quietly. Company representatives lobbied lawmakers, and Tesla sent an email to its New Jersey customers, urging them to contact the legislature and oppose the bill.
Why is it important
There is no federal rulebook for driverless cars, so each state writes its own. That patchwork allowed Tesla to push its Robotaxi forward in friendly states while safety questions piled up. New Jersey, and New York close behind, can change the mind, turning the hardware choice into a legal line.
Europe is tightening its driving laws in parallel, with new cars now requiring mandatory safety equipment. If the sensor mandate spreads, Musk faces an expensive choice: bolt the lid on his cars, or watch them shut down in some of the country’s wealthiest markets.
