Denver can put a parking ticket on a driverless Waymo, and the company says it pays them. If the same car blows through a stop sign in front of a Denver police officer, the officer has no one to hand a citation to. “If there’s no driver, there currently isn’t a mechanism within state law for issuing a citation,” a Denver Police Department spokesperson told BusinessDen in September, and the department gave CBS Colorado the same answer on Oct. 14.
Colorado wrote that gap into law in 2017, when lawmakers told self-driving systems to obey every rule of the road and never said who answers when one doesn’t. The fix other states settled on is a single sentence naming the company. The harder problem is that a fine, by itself, does very little to a fleet…