Robotaxis are expanding. So is the fight over the rules governing them.
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal earlier this year that would have opened the door to driverless robotaxis outside New York City after taxi drivers, unions, and state lawmakers opposed it. Six months later, commercial driverless service remains illegal in the state, and legalization efforts are stalled.
In DC, labor unions are fighting legislation that would legalize commercial robotaxis, while lawmakers are weighing a 200-vehicle cap and a 15-cent-per-mile fee that would fund Metro upgrades and aid workers displaced by autonomous vehicles. A July City Council hearing on the proposal stretched for a grueling 10 hours.
In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, a vocal supporter of robotaxis, is now calling for tougher robotaxi regulations after Waymos repeatedly snarled traffic during emergencies and major events. And as of July, California police can now formally cite autonomous-vehicle manufacturers when their driverless cars break traffic laws.
And while Congress has yet to pass comprehensive robotaxi legislation, federal regulators have stepped up their scrutiny. The Trump administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently warned autonomous-vehicle companies that vehicles unable to safely interact with police, firefighters, and other first responders pose a danger to the public.
Even in states that have broadly welcomed autonomous vehicles, governments are grappling with how to oversee them. Texas this year began enforcing new permitting requirements for commercial AV operators, while cities in Florida have complained that state preemption laws leave them with little power to respond to problems on their own streets.
Even in states that have broadly welcomed autonomous vehicles, governments are grappling with how to oversee them
Taxi drivers, labor unions, and safety advocates have fought autonomous vehicles for years. What’s changing is the scale and immediacy of the fight. Now that robotaxis have burst free from the pages of science fiction and onto actual city streets, policymakers are confronting a messier reality filled with questions about safety, regulation, growth, and jobs. They’re having to decide how quickly fleets should be allowed to expand, what companies must prove before they do, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.
Waymo, the market leader, is currently operating more than 3,500 vehicles publicly in 11 US cities. Zoox — a purpose-built robotaxi without a steering wheel that bears a striking resemblance to a toaster — just began offering paid rides in Las Vegas and continues to offer free trips to users of its Explorer program in San Francisco as it collects feedback. It’s testing in a total of 10 cities and plans to extend the Explorer program to Austin and Miami later this year. Tesla, which began its Robotaxi rollout with a safety monitor aboard more than a year ago, appears to finally be growing its unsupervised fleet ahead of launching its purpose-built robotaxi, the Cybercab, later this month.
Still, for all the political attention, robotaxis remain a tiny share of the US ridehailing market. While Waymo now provides more than 500,000 paid rides a week, Uber handles about 40 million trips a day globally. At that scale, robotaxis haven’t yet displaced many driving jobs or fundamentally changed how cities move. But their visibility vastly exceeds their market share, especially when a driverless car stops in the wrong place during a blackout or interferes with an emergency response.
And the consequences could look very different as autonomous fleets grow from thousands of vehicles to hundreds of thousands. That’s why the battles taking shape across the country are increasingly about the terms of expansion: what companies have to prove before they grow, what they owe cities and workers, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.
What the critics want
In many places, the robotaxi rollout has outpaced the rules governing it.
“Robotaxis are popping up all over the place,” said Shua Sanchez, national campaign director of SAVE-US, a nonprofit advocating for stricter state AV legislation in the absence of federal rules. “The state legislatures don’t have experience with this technology, and there aren’t good laws on the books to regulate them.”
SAVE-US is working with lawmakers in New Jersey and New York on a three-pronged approach. It wants multi-stage testing and commercial-deployment permits, under which companies would have to demonstrate their vehicles can operate safely with a small fleet before adding more cars, while continuing to share safety data after commercial service begins. It also wants autonomous vehicles to use multiple kinds of sensors, rather than relying on cameras alone (as Tesla does), and is calling for restrictions on marketing terms like “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving” for consumer driver-assist features when the systems still require human oversight.
The group isn’t opposed to autonomous vehicles, Sanchez said, but is “pro the safe development of technology.” He added that AV safety isn’t a settled question, and that even a strong record today doesn’t guarantee the same after a software or hardware change.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who has pushed for greater federal oversight of AVs, makes a similar argument about transparency.
“Autonomous vehicle companies are making huge claims about how their technology is going to save lives,” Markey told The Verge in a statement. “But right now, our regulatory structure amounts to this: we hope they’re telling the truth.”
Markey has investigated AV companies’ use of remote human operators and introduced legislation that would require them to regularly report safety data.
“Right now, our regulatory structure amounts to this: we hope they’re telling the truth.”
Sen. Ed Markey
“Communities deserve transparency and consistent oversight before we let Big Tech invade their public roads,” he said.
But safety is only part of the fight. For labor groups, the stakes are also economic.
Peter Finn, Teamsters international vice president at large, called autonomous vehicles an “existential threat” to the work his members do. He pointed to the enormous number of jobs potentially affected by autonomous driving beyond rideshare drivers, including truckers, delivery drivers, and other commercial drivers.
Like other groups in the robotaxi debate, the Teamsters insist they aren’t opposed to new technology in principle. But that still leaves them staking out positions that would sharply constrain how autonomous vehicles are deployed.
That includes requiring heavy-duty autonomous vehicles like semitrucks to have a trained human operator aboard — legislation the Teamsters have twice pushed in California, only to see Gov. Gavin Newsom veto it. Finn said the Teamsters plan to pursue the issue again.
“If the technology is solely designed to automate and eliminate labor costs, the only entity benefiting from that is corporations,” Finn said.
The Teamsters’ immediate legislative priority isn’t robotaxis themselves so much as what it sees coming next.
To Finn, Waymo and Zoox are precursors to a much larger fight over autonomous driving. He pointed specifically to Zoox’s ownership by Amazon, arguing that similar technology could eventually be applied to package delivery.
Zoox and Waymo both said their current focus remains their robotaxi services.
Taken together, the objections go beyond any one safety rule or labor concern. AV resistance has become part of a broader backlash to Big Tech’s growing physical footprint, from data centers to Flock cameras. Companies are pouring enormous sums into new infrastructure, and many residents are still asking what, exactly, they get in return for having it in their communities.
Even robotaxi companies want rules
Robotaxi companies, meanwhile, are trying to get ahead of the backlash — and sidestep a patchwork of confusing state and local laws — by helping shape the rules themselves. That includes supporting certain regulations while pushing back on others they see as too restrictive.
“I want to unequivocally say we agree with the administrator and the administration and the regulatory agency. We need to be regulated,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans recently said on Fox Business in response to NHTSA’s warnings about unsafe interactions with emergency vehicles.
Zoox said it is also trying to head off conflicts before entering new markets. Ron Thaniel, the company’s senior director of policy and regulatory affairs, said Zoox establishes lines of communication with local and state officials and conducts hands-on engagement with first responders before launching in a city. As the industry expands, he said, Zoox sees “an opportunity at the federal level to more uniformly regulate autonomous vehicles.”
Waymo told The Verge much the same thing.
“I think there definitely needs to be some regulation,” Waymo global head of public policy Justin Kintz said. “They’re powered by incredible technology that makes the world a safer place, but it still needs oversight from the federal government, from states, and from cities in the same way that they manage human drivers today.”
“I want to unequivocally say we agree with the administrator and the administration and the regulatory agency. We need to be regulated.”
Zoox CEO Aicha Evans
Zoox and Waymo are hardly alone in wanting clearer rules. The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which counts both companies as members, has said only about half of US states have passed laws that allow vehicles to operate without humans. The industry group believes states should establish a legal framework for AVs, require first-responder interaction plans, and set minimum requirements before vehicles can operate without a human driver. (The association didn’t respond to requests for more specifics.)
Waymo said it has long advocated for a national AV safety standard covering minimum testing requirements, vehicle design, and data sharing. Under its preferred system, the federal government would continue setting vehicle safety standards, while states would govern road rules and cities would handle local concerns like curb space, law enforcement, and emergency response.
The disagreements emerge in the details.
In Washington, DC, Waymo said it broadly supports Councilmember Charles Allen’s effort to establish a regulatory framework allowing commercial robotaxi service, including its goals of funding transit and helping workers transition as transportation becomes more automated. But it objects to parts of the current proposal.
Waymo said a 200-vehicle limit would probably be too small for a city the size of Washington. It could accept starting small, but wants regulators to let fleets grow as companies demonstrate safe performance rather than putting a permanent ceiling into law.
“I don’t think legislation needs to set a hard cap on that,” Kintz said, “or it’s going to lead to preventing important groups from being able to access the service when they need it.”
The company has been more receptive to the proposed 15-cent fee for every mile an autonomous vehicle travels. Kintz said Waymo supports “the fundamental principle of raising revenue” for transit and affected workers, though it raised concerns that a per-mile charge could become prohibitively expensive, particularly for smaller AV operators. An annual fee, it suggested, is one possible alternative.
Emergency response is another area where Waymo says it supports regulation, even as it argues that some of the work is already underway. After NHTSA called for stronger coordination between AV companies and first responders, Waymo said it immediately asked to participate in the agency’s discussions. The company said it already maintains dedicated first responder training programs and 24/7 priority lines for dispatchers and officers, while Kintz acknowledged that “we haven’t always got it right.”
“We haven’t always got it right.”
Waymo global head of public policy Justin Kintz
Waymo is also trying to make the case that robotaxis can complement, rather than undermine, public transit. In a Streetsblog piece this month, Waymo policy development and research manager Arielle Fleisher argued the company has “common cause” with urbanists trying to reduce dependence on private cars. Waymo told The Verge that in San Francisco more than a third of its riders use the service to connect with public transportation. But research has also suggested that robotaxis could replace some trips that otherwise would have been taken on public transit, potentially undermining ridership rather than complementing it.
On labor, Waymo argues that automation will eliminate some tasks while creating others.
“These cars don’t clean, charge, fix themselves, code themselves,” Kintz said, pointing to jobs including fleet technicians, mechanics, remote support workers, and operations managers. Of course, simply taking the driver out of the driver’s seat could have huge economic implications. Earlier this month, Uber said that 10.2 million drivers and couriers earned money on its platform during the second quarter.
Kintz acknowledged that autonomous vehicles could eventually displace drivers and said Waymo was “eyes open” about that possibility. But he argued the change would happen over time and that unions could help build retraining and reskilling programs for affected workers.
Asked whether autonomous driving would ultimately create more jobs than it eliminated, Kintz said it was “too soon to tell.”
Notably Waymo has continued to expand as these fights play out. The California Public Utilities Commission this month cleared the company to expand driverless passenger service across parts of 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego and more of the Los Angeles and Bay Area regions.
For now, robotaxis are helping a very small number of Americans get around. The fights underway today are about what happens if they don’t stay that way.
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