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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the public-safety enforcement frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Public-safety enforcement frame
California is finally closing an accountability gap that let driverless cars break traffic laws with impunity, giving police the tools to cite manufacturers directly and forcing companies to answer when their vehicles disrupt emergencies.
Regulatory leadership frame
California is setting the national benchmark for how to govern autonomous vehicles, building out the country's most comprehensive AV rulebook as the technology scales across its cities.
Tech-meets-legal-vacuum frame
Driverless cars have outpaced the basic machinery of traffic enforcement — officers literally have no one to hand a ticket to — and regulators are now scrambling to retrofit a legal system built around human drivers.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
Closing the accountability gap
A traffic-safety regulator would argue —
When a Waymo made an illegal U-turn directly in front of San Bruno officers last September, they pulled it over and discovered they had no one to ticket. That is not a quirky anecdote — it is a hole in the basic deterrence structure of traffic law. Moving violations get deterred because someone pays a fine and accumulates points; if a robotaxi fleet faces neither, the incentive to fix the underlying software bug is purely reputational. Our new rules route the citation to the manufacturer, where the actual decision-making lives, and require a 30-second response when emergency crews call. That is how you make a fleet operator internalize the cost of every illegal turn and every blocked fire truck.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.