TRENTON — Is New Jersey ready for cars and trucks that drive themselves?
It may sound like the distant future but the Garden State could have driverless cars within months, not years or decades.
Since June, autonomous rideshare company Waymo has been mapping out parts of New Jersey.
These areas have been limited to Jersey City, Hoboken, and the surroundings of Newark Liberty International Airport. Currently, cars with human drivers are responsible for the process.
Still, New Jersey is lagging a little behind other parts of the country.
Last week, the rideshare service started offering driverless rides in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. On Tuesday, they added Miami to the list. The vehicles cannot go on freeways.
The company's cars have already driven 96 million miles, and they're safer than human drivers, Waymo representative Matthew Walsh said to New Jersey lawmakers last week.
He said Waymo's robot drivers were responsible for 91% fewer crashes involving serious injury compared to human drivers over the same distance.
Yet, some state legislators are wary of letting Waymo set its fleet of autonomous vehicles loose on New Jersey roads.
Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex) has introduced a bill (S4702) to create a three-year pilot program for AVs. It would create a testing phase through 2028.
“By initiating this program, we will lay the groundwork for massive improvements to our transit infrastructure, building off of years of autonomous vehicle research to improve public safety and expand access to reliable transportation," Zwicker said.
The pilot program would be overseen by a task force of state and industry experts. Among other guidelines, every crash involving an AV would have to be submitted to the task force for record-keeping within 48 hours.
Drawing the most controversy is a rule that would require a human tester to sit in the driver's seat of every AV so they could take immediate control in the event of an emergency. This would be required through all three years of the pilot.
Saying that the bill would delay Waymo's deployment in New Jersey until at least 2028, Walsh said the company is against the bill unless it gets serious revisions.
"We believe this bill is not in line with the reality of where the autonomous vehicle industry is today," Walsh said.
The bill passed the Senate Budget Committee last week with an understanding that changes would be made before the final bill gets a vote.
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