Driverless Cars Now A Reality

In California, it's illegal to talk on a cell phone handset while driving your car. The reasoning is pretty simple: with one hand glued to your smartphone, not only are you distracted, but you only have one hand on the wheel.

But what if you were sitting in your car and didn't actually have to drive?

The California state legislature just moved that dream closer to reality by approving a bill paving the way for driverless cars on Golden State freeways. The bill, SB 1298, authored by State Senator Alex Padilla (D-Van Nuys), passed the state Assembly and then won overwhelming approval in the state Senate (37–0 in the Senate, 74–2 in the Assembly).

If signed by Governor Jerry Brown, Padilla's bill would legally allow autonomous vehicles on public roads and direct the state's Department of Motor Vehicles to write safety and performance standards for self-driving cars — rules that did not exist under the vehicle code at the time. Notably, even under the bill, the cars would still require a flesh-and-blood human behind the wheel, ready to take over.

"It sounds space age, but it's almost here," Padilla told the San Jose Mercury News. "If we can reduce the number of accidents, that alone is worth doing this bill."

Bay Area tech giant Google was the driving force. Its self-driving car project had already logged more than 300,000 test miles (50,000 of them without any human intervention), and Nevada had passed a similar law the year before. Brown signed SB 1298 into law on September 25, 2012 — at Google's Mountain View headquarters, alongside co-founder Sergey Brin, who predicted the public could be riding in self-driving cars within five years.

The numbers behind the push were compelling: the vast majority of vehicle accidents are due to human error, and Google reported no accidents while its cars were under computer control. Critics, like Consumer Watchdog, warned that Sacramento was rushing to endorse a technology without settling liability and privacy questions — who owns the data a robot car collects about your movements?

Five years came and went without robotaxis on every corner. But the bill that passed in August 2012 did something that mattered: it made "driverless car" a legal category instead of a science-fiction prop. Everything that followed — the testing fleets, the DMV rulemaking, the eventual (very gradual) rollout — traces back to this law.