California self-driving cars exempt from traffic tickets

It makes sense to enforce tickets for reckless or dangerous driving, but what about when there's no one actually driving the car?

Well, the US state of California has made a move to make self-driving cars exempt from traffic tickets.

This comes according to new California state laws, according to NBC Bay Area.

Police Chief Bill Scott of NBC Bay Area informed in an internal memo that: 'no citation for a moving violation can be issued if the [autonomous vehicle] is being operated in a driverless mode.'

'Technology evolves rapidly and, at times, faster than legislation or regulations can adapt to the changes.'

California self-driving vehicles will be exempt from traffic tickets / nonnie192 / gremlin / Getty

Usually in most cases, if a car has been involved in an incident, blame would automatically be pointed at the owner of the vehicle, at the very least.

However, the new law kind of makes sense when you think that the driver wouldn't necessarily be the one controlling the vehicle in Autonomous mode.

Instead of enforcing a ticket, California law enforcement has been instructed to record information about the vehicle and licence plate when observing a traffic violation.

However, tickets can still be enforced for issues that fall under the responsibility of the vehicle owner, such as mechanical or registration violations, as well as parking fines.

Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation at the San Francisco Police Department raised the question: 'When you're a police officer out there in the field, and there's a vehicle that has violated the vehicle code, which happens every day in San Francisco, who do you give the citation to?'

It is up state legislature to update the laws for the road, though some experts believe more needs to be done to keep up with the rapid development of this autonomous technology.

Major self-driving companies like Cruise were temporarily banned in San Francisco when one car crashed into a fire truck, whilst another two robotaxis struck pedestrians, leaving one individual in critical condition.

One officer believes 'more work needs to be done' to clarify the penalty of a self-driving vehicle violation / nonnie192 / gremlin / Getty

The California Department of Motor Vehicles asked Cruise to limit the number of driverless vehicles on the road, whilst the company defended that it needed more miles on the vehicles to improve its system.

Tumlin added 'there is additional work that needs to be done to clarify what happens when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law.'

In contrast, Texas and Arizona have updated their laws to allow traffic tickets for driverless cars to be directed to the owners, even if there's no one physically behind the wheel.

This was introduced on the back of cases of numerous driverless cars getting stuck in wet cement and blocking oncoming traffic and public paths.

Growing concerns about the safety of self-driving technology have been most notable in Elon Musk's Tesla vehicles.

One ex-Tesla employee recently voiced his concerns about the readiness of both the hardware and software in Tesla's Autopilot feature, with pedestrians at high risk if faults were to occur.