NJ bill would block Tesla's camera-only Robotaxi
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- New Jersey's S1677 bill would require fully driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — in practice radar and lidar — effectively excluding Tesla's camera-only Robotaxi from the state.
- State Senator Andrew Zwicker, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory who rode in a Waymo in Phoenix before sponsoring the bill, insists it is "not anti-Tesla" but "pro-New Jersey safety."
- The bill also favors traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals, which would exclude Tesla's Cybercab — a vehicle Tesla is already mass-producing with neither.
- Tesla's lobbying backfired when it warned NJ Tesla owners the bill would ban Tesla, generating roughly 4,000 protest emails to Zwicker's office in a single day; Zwicker clarified the bill targets only fully driverless commercial fleets, not consumer Autopilot or FSD.
- Waymo operates more than 3,500 driverless vehicles across 11 US metro areas, while Tesla has only a handful of unsupervised test vehicles — mostly in Texas — despite Musk's promise of hundreds of thousands of autonomous Teslas by end of 2026.
- The three-year pilot requires operators to complete 50,000 miles of supervised testing with a human safety driver, report every crash, and obtain official authorization before launching a commercial driverless network.
- New York is considering a nearly identical hardware mandate, suggesting the NJ approach could become a multi-state template.
Why it matters: Tesla's bottleneck isn't regulation — it's execution. It has only a handful of unsupervised test vehicles in lightly-regulated Texas while Waymo runs 3,500+ across 11 cities. If NJ's sensor mandate spreads, Musk must choose between his "vision-only" philosophy and dense Northeast markets, while consumer FSD owners turn out to be collateral noise, not affected users.
