No US state has passed a comprehensive robotaxi liability statute

No comprehensive statute

No state has passed a comprehensive statute assigning liability for crashes involving fully driverless vehicles, BNO News reported in November 2026. Bills have been introduced in California and elsewhere, but none has become law, and federal legislation has stalled repeatedly. The result is that each crash is resolved under existing negligence and product liability doctrine, adapted by courts and insurers.

Driverless taxis are no longer an experiment. Waymo operates commercial service in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin. Tesla runs a limited robotaxi pilot in Texas. Zoox planned to launch paid rides in Las Vegas, the Los Angeles Times reported in October. In California, Tesla's service still uses a human safety driver because its permit only allows a human to drive a traditional vehicle, Electrek reported. Millions of paid rides have been completed without a human behind the wheel, BNO News reported.

From driver negligence to product liability

A robotaxi has no onboard driver to be negligent. If the vehicle made a bad decision, fault can lie with the system that made it, which pushes the case toward product liability rather than ordinary negligence, BNO News reported. Product liability cases are typically more complex and more expensive to litigate and require technical evidence that only the manufacturer holds.

Liability is not automatic. It follows the conduct or defect that caused the crash, and more than one party may be responsible under state product liability and negligence rules, according to a FinancialContent analysis. Potential defendants include the fleet operator, the vehicle manufacturer, the software developer and component suppliers. A human driver, an owner, a maintenance provider or another road user can also be implicated.

Evidence access is a hurdle. BNO News reported that key camera, lidar and software logs are held by the operator and usually require legal process to obtain, and that proving a driving system behaved unreasonably requires expert analysis, a burden for injured parties.

Regulators act case by case

Federal regulators have proceeded case by case. NHTSA opened a preliminary evaluation of Waymo's automated driving system in 2024 after incidents including collisions with stationary objects and vehicles behaving unexpectedly near school buses, and expanded the review, BNO News reported. Waymo has issued software recalls in response.

The clearest action involved Cruise, General Motors' former robotaxi unit. After a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco in October 2023, the California DMV suspended the company's permits, citing the incident and the company's failure to disclose the full sequence of events, BNO News reported. Cruise paid a federal fine, halted operations nationwide and was eventually wound down by GM.

Permit suspensions and recalls can shape company behavior. They do not compensate the person in the hospital, BNO News reported.

California's narrower law

California has moved on a narrower problem. Senate Bill 1246, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2026, takes effect on July 1, 2028, according to Yahoo News. It shifts responsibility for responding to crashes involving autonomous vehicles from first responders to the companies operating them. Operators must send local incident technicians to crashes and obstructions on request. They must staff remote personnel at levels sufficient to respond immediately. They must notify local jurisdictions and dispatch centers during any fleetwide emergency or system failure, including vehicle locations and status.

Local authorities may fine operators when an autonomous vehicle blocks first-responder operations during an emergency for more than 30 minutes. Fines and response-time standards are not settled. The DMV must set them before the law takes effect. Legislative analyses cited windows of 10 and 20 minutes at different stages of the bill's passage, Yahoo News reported.

The staffing rules land differently by company. Yahoo News reported that Waymo was the largest US robotaxi operator by fleet size, with roughly 4,000 vehicles nationwide and about 1,200 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that its remote-assistance network includes staff in the Philippines. The same report identified Tesla as the only company that has publicly stated it uses remote operators who can directly take control of its robotaxis. Zoox has said its remote-operations teams are U.S.-based.

Available legislative materials establish that remote drivers must be located in the United States and hold a valid California driver's license, Yahoo News reported. Whether identical requirements apply to remote-assistance staff remains subject to the final statutory text and DMV rules. Remote assistance means a human advises or sends instructions while the autonomous system remains in control.

What happens next

The DMV must set response-time and penalty standards before the law takes effect. Whether SB 1246 functions as an accountability mechanism depends on how specifically the DMV writes those standards and how consistently local governments apply penalties, Yahoo News reported.