For more than a decade, the biggest fight in self-driving cars has played out in boardrooms and engineering labs. New Jersey now wants to settle it in law.
A bill moving through the state legislature would force any company running fully driverless cars in New Jersey to fit them with a camera system plus two other ways of sensing the road, in practice lidar and radar.
Tesla builds its cars with cameras alone. If the bill passes, its Robotaxi could not operate in the state unless it changed the hardware. The Verge first reported the details.
The measure would make New Jersey the first state to write a sensor mandate into law. A near-identical bill is already pending next door in New York. If either passes, other states could follow, and the domino effect would land squarely on Elon Musk’s camera-only bet.
What the bill actually says
The legislation is a Senate committee substitute for Senate Bill 1677, which the Senate Transportation Committee adopted on 11 May. Its sponsor is state Senator Andrew Zwicker, a physicist who works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
It sets up a three-year pilot programme for fully autonomous vehicles, with the Department of Transportation deciding who gets in.
The sensor rule sits in section four. Every car in the pilot must carry “a camera system and two distinct sensing modalities” that can still spot and track obstacles if the cameras fail. Those systems have to handle pedestrian detection, automatic emergency braking, and lane keeping.
In plain terms, a camera is not enough on its own.
There is more in the bill that Tesla will not like. Cars must log data from 30 seconds before any crash, clock 50,000 miles of testing before going driverless, and carry at least $5m of insurance. They cannot drive in school zones, construction zones, or places with high rates of pedestrian collisions.
A quiet shot at ‘Full Self-Driving’
One section takes aim at how these systems are sold. Dealers and carmakers must hand buyers a written description of what a partial automated system can and cannot do. They cannot market a partial system in a way that implies the car can drive itself. Break that rule and it counts as consumer fraud under state law.
Tesla sells a driver-assist package it calls Full Self-Driving, which still requires a human to pay attention. The naming has drawn lawsuits and regulator scrutiny for years. New Jersey wants that gap between the label and the reality spelled out at the point of sale.
Cameras against the world
Musk has staked billions on the idea that cameras and artificial intelligence can do the whole job. “We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety,” he wrote last year. “Cameras for the win.” He argues that piling on extra sensors creates conflicting signals, a problem he calls sensor contention.
Almost everyone else in the field disagrees. Waymo, the clear market leader, runs cameras alongside lidar and radar, which cope far better in fog, rain, and darkness. In Europe, one startup is even testing a Level 4 car that uses no AI at all to drive, leaning entirely on sensors and rules.
“To run 24/7 across the majority of public roads in New Jersey today, it needs lidar,” Carnegie Mellon professor Philip Koopman told The Verge. “It’s pretty clear that today camera-only technology is not up to the challenge.”
The scoreboard backs him up. Tesla runs a fleet of 42 driverless Robotaxis on public roads in Texas. Waymo has 577 authorised in the same state, plus several thousand more across ten US metro areas. Musk promised hundreds of thousands of Tesla robotaxis by the end of this year.
That has not happened.
Not anti-Tesla, says the sponsor
Zwicker rejects the idea that he is targeting one company. “This is not anti-Tesla,” he told The Verge. “I’m pro-New Jersey safety.” He became a believer in the technology after riding a Waymo in Phoenix, and it struck him how quickly the ride felt normal. His worry is not the promise but the timeline.
He is not convinced cameras and software alone can yet handle everything a human driver can.
Tesla is not waiting quietly. Company representatives are lobbying lawmakers, and Tesla has emailed its New Jersey customers, urging them to contact the legislature and oppose the bill.
Why it matters
There is no federal rulebook for driverless cars, so each state writes its own. That patchwork has let Tesla push its Robotaxi forward in friendly states while safety questions pile up. New Jersey, and New York close behind, would flip the logic, turning a hardware choice into a legal line.
Europe is tightening its own driving rules in parallel, with new cars there now needing a raft of mandatory safety aids. If the sensor mandate spreads, Musk faces an expensive choice: bolt lidar onto his cars, or watch them shut out of some of the richest markets in the country.
