States Ramp Up Autonomous Vehicle Laws as Deployment Expands
Key Takeaways
- A majority of states have enacted autonomous vehicle state laws authorizing testing or deployment, with companies now operating AV fleets in a dozen cities across California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
- States like Virginia, Missouri, Oregon, and Wisconsin are considering new state autonomous vehicle legislation, while New York, Maryland, and Minnesota are working to amend existing laws to move from testing-only frameworks to full deployment authorization.
- The workforce impacts of autonomous vehicles are prompting legislative action, with Virginia establishing a study commission on job displacement and states like California and Missouri considering bills requiring human drivers in commercial AVs.
- AV liability and insurance laws are being tested as deployment scales up, with California proposing citations for manufacturers of fully autonomous vehicles and Tennessee taking the opposite approach by holding registered owners responsible.
- New AV testing and deployment regulations address software updates, with California considering legislation requiring manufacturers to notify insurers when pushing updates to automated driving systems.
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While policymakers wrestle with how to regulate generative AI, the states have spent the last decade quietly building a regulatory framework for a different kind of AI: the automated driving systems that power autonomous vehicles. That framework is now being tested in real time. Today, a handful of companies are now deploying taxi-like fleets of AVs on city streets and highways in a dozen municipalities, and a majority of states have enacted laws authorizing AV testing, deployment, or both. The legislation moving through statehouses this year offers a preview of the debates to come: workforce displacement, liability assignment, and how to regulate software that updates faster than any statute can keep up.
While a broad regulatory framework for generative AI (e.g., chatbots) has eluded policymakers thus far, California took a leading role in developing a robust regulatory system to test and now deploy autonomous vehicles on its public roadways. The easiest way to distinguish between “testing” and “deployment” of autonomous vehicles is that testing typically requires a “safety driver” behind the wheel to monitor the automated driving systems (ADS) that “drives” an AV, while deployment allows an AV to operate with no one behind the wheel, and thus accomplish the goal of an AV-taxi fleet like Waymo is deploying in nine cities across California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
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