Autonomous vehicles (AVs) now carry more than 500,000 paying passengers a week across 11 American cities. As ridership increases, the record of safety AVs hold grows even stronger. Waymo’s fleet is involved in 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury than human drivers on the same roads.
So, why does half the country still have no legal way for a driverless car to pick up a passenger? While twenty-six states allow vehicles to operate without a human driver, in the other 24, the law permits testing only or says nothing at all. As a result, AVs are not legal for consumers in those states despite the fact that they have consistently been shown to be far safer than their alternative.
Increasingly out of date state vehicle codes were written on the assumption that a licensed human sits behind the wheel. Federal regulators set the standards a vehicle must meet, and states decide who is allowed to drive it, which means a driverless car can satisfy every federal requirement and still be illegal to operate commercially. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) granted Zoox the first commercial exemption of its kind in July, clearing the company’s last federal hurdle to deployment, but Zoox still needs states to explicitly permit them to serve consumers.
Ride-hailing never faced this problem. Uber and Lyft launched into legal gray areas, absorbed the risk, and through producing a higher quality and more affordable service than traditional taxis, they built a customer base large enough that taking the service away became politically impossible. An autonomous vehicle company cannot build a constituency in a state where serving one is illegal, so opponents of AVs only need to protect the status quo to prevent consumers from having access to new and safer forms of driving.
Despite an estimated 36,640 deaths in motor vehicle crashes in 2025, some strong political interests are working to defend the status quo, or at least use it as leverage.
Labor Unions
Labor wants fewer autonomous vehicles on the road, and has been the most direct about saying so. Teamsters locals in Boston joined a coalition behind an ordinance that would effectively ban self-driving cars from the city. When the D.C. Council took up its authorization bill in July, Teamsters and transit unions rallied outside the Wilson Building and recruited Uber and Lyft drivers to testify against it. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance is a leading opponent of New York’s AV legislation, and Governor Hochul withdrew her own proposal to legalize driverless taxis outside New York City in February after an outcry from driver groups.
The Trial Bar
Plaintiffs’ attorneys have a different objective. Ordinary car-crash litigation makes up the majority of state liability cases that reach a courtroom, and a technology that prevents crashes shrinks that caseload. The response has been to enlarge what remains, expanding the liability exposure attached to every autonomous vehicle on the road even where that exposure makes deployment uneconomic.
Testifying on the DC’s bill in July, the Trial Lawyers Association of Metropolitan Washington said it took “no position today on whether autonomous vehicles should operate” in the city and asked the Council to pass the bill’s liability framework. It then asked for considerably more. Keep the $5 million liability floor, add a second $5 million in uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, install a separate read-only sensor recorder in every vehicle, publish unredacted federal crash data, and revisit whether $5 million per occurrence is enough once a fleet grows past 200 vehicles.
Additionally, the American Association for Justice has opposed autonomous vehicle legislation for nearly a decade regardless, because a national standard would take away the state-by-state leverage that benefits the trial bar today.
Legacy Ride-Sharing Platforms
Uber has a history of AV investment, and has partnered with Waymo in many American cities. Rather than inherently opposed to AVs, they are keen to ensure that AVs reach the market on terms that keep riders on its app. In New Jersey and the District, Uber is lobbying for hybrid-network requirements that would leave Waymo with two choices: put its robotaxis on a competitor’s app, or employ human drivers for its self-driving cars. Those proposals also cap how many autonomous rides may be offered against rides with a human at the wheel.
The Cost of Waiting
None of these groups needs to win the safety argument. They just need an authorization bill to stall, or to arrive carrying enough conditions that launching AV service in that locality is not worth it. Either outcome protects their existing political and economic position at the expense of public safety.
American companies offer the safest autonomous vehicles in the world and run them under a patchwork of state laws that leaves half the country with no path to market. Half a million Americans a week already choose a driverless ride, yet most of the country is not allowed to join them.
Photo by Nishat Samadzai on Unsplash