Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1246 on September 30, and it carries the name of Senator Dave Cortese, a Democrat from San Jose, whose district sits over the part of the Bay Area where the state's robotaxi fleet does most of its driving. The chaptered text sets out what companies will owe first responders by July 1, 2028: remote drivers who are physically in the United States and hold a California driver's license, local incident technicians dispatched to crashes and obstructions, quarterly records filed with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and a civil penalty of up to $10,000 for each commercial autonomous vehicle that interferes with an emergency.
The penalty is the part that will get quoted. The mechanism behind it is the part worth reading.
The clock starts when an official asks for a technician, not when the car stops
Section 38806 allows a city attorney or county counsel to bring a civil action, in the jurisdiction where the violation happened, for up to $5,000 for each violation of the section that governs technician dispatch and fleet notifications, and up to $10,000 for each commercial autonomous vehicle that causes an obstruction or interferes with emergency events, emergency operations or law enforcement operations.
The higher figure attaches only where the interference lasts more than thirty minutes measured from the moment an emergency response official asks the company for a local incident technician. That starting point is the design. A vehicle can sit across a fire lane, a station exit or the only approach to a crash scene for twenty-nine minutes without the enhanced penalty ever beginning to run. What the statute prices is how long the company took to answer, not how long the road stayed closed.
The text is explicit that this is not a criminal matter: a violation of the chapter "is not a crime." The remedy is money, pursued by local government, and the court is told to weigh the nature and duration of the interference, its consequences, whether the conduct was isolated or repeated, and any mitigating or aggravating circumstances, including matters beyond the manufacturer's reasonable control. A company whose cars are stranded because a cell network failed in a wider outage has an argument written into the statute before a judge ever hears it.
Thirty seconds to answer, and a driver somewhere in the United States
The obligations that generate the fine are more specific than the fine itself. Section 38754 requires that a remote driver be located within the United States and hold a driver's license valid for operation in California, of the appropriate class and carrying any required endorsements. Remote operation of a commercial autonomous vehicle by someone sitting in another country, which some operators have used to keep labor costs down, ends when the section takes effect.
Section 38751 sets a response standard that reads like a service-level agreement. A remote human operator with situational awareness of the fleet must establish two-way contact within thirty seconds of a call, and that operator has to be able to immobilize the vehicle, allow an official to move it, or move it as directed. Manufacturers must reserve or contractually assure enough capacity to cover the maximum number of simultaneous remote assistance sessions their own operational design, hazard analysis and capacity planning identify, and staff so that remote drivers and assistants can respond immediately, unless connectivity is lost because of a wider telecommunications failure outside the company's control.
For a commercial autonomous vehicle built without manual controls, Section 38803 adds a physical requirement: a remote assistant or driver must be able to shift the vehicle into neutral, move it as directed by an official, or power it down and leave it stationary until someone directs otherwise. A car that cannot be pushed, towed or told to stop is the failure mode the section is written against.
The technicians have to be people, and the cars have to be findable
Section 38801 requires immediate dispatch of a local incident technician when a company learns of a crash or an incident that immobilizes a vehicle, obstructs traffic or emergency access, creates a roadway hazard, or needs onsite help to clear, and when an emergency response official or a 911 dispatch center asks for one. In a fleetwide emergency or system failure that creates a hazard or impedes response, the manufacturer must immediately notify affected local jurisdictions, including emergency dispatch, of the location and status of the vehicles involved, and deploy technicians wherever vehicles cannot be recovered remotely.
The law defines who counts as a technician. It is a natural person responding onsite for the manufacturer, either an employee or someone working for a contracted entity that employs at least fifty local incident technicians, or a tow operator that has an arrangement with the California Highway Patrol, local law enforcement or a transportation department for towing and storage. That definition closes the cheapest version of compliance, in which a company answers the phone and promises help that never physically arrives.
If an official decides a remote driver or assistant cannot reasonably deal with the request, the manufacturer has to dispatch a technician immediately, and that technician may coordinate for the company and manually relocate or tow the vehicle.
The permit is the lever, and the DMV is holding it
The fine is retrospective and capped. The permit is neither. Section 38751 says the Department of Motor Vehicles may not renew, reinstate or expand a permit's operational design domain unless the manufacturer certifies full compliance with the response and capacity requirements, which puts the state's permission to operate, and to grow, behind the same thirty-second standard the fine punishes at $10,000 a vehicle.
Section 38805 requires manufacturers to keep records on technician response times and on responses to fleetwide emergencies and system failures, along with emergency events, immobilizations, obstructions, crashes and official requests, and to provide them to the department quarterly. The department may share the records with the Public Utilities Commission for oversight of autonomous passenger service, and it must publish summary statistics broken down by manufacturer every quarter.
Section 38802 sets the deadline that will decide how much any of this means. By July 1, 2028, the department must adopt guidelines establishing reasonable response-time standards for technicians to be present at a scene, weighing geography, the type and severity of the incident, roadway and traffic conditions, fleet size and the capacity to handle simultaneous incidents. The legislature wrote the fine. It left the number that triggers the judgment to an agency, and gave the agency the same date it gave the industry.
What the legislature wrote down about the last two years
The bill's supporters are the people who have been standing next to the cars. SEIU California sponsored it, and the California Professional Firefighters, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Amalgamated Transit Union's California conference board, the state labor federation and the League of California Cities supported it. Theresa Rutherford, president of SEIU 1021, put the case in one line: "First responders should not be roadside assistance to AV corporations' fleets."
The record the author's office cites is a run of Bay Area incidents. During Fourth of July celebrations this year, multiple Waymo vehicles blocked roadways and lost power. During a San Francisco power outage in December, roughly 1,500 Waymo vehicles stalled. First responders trying to reach autonomous vehicle companies by phone were left on hold for as long as fifty-three minutes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wrote to the industry in July urging it to address what the agency described as a clear pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with law enforcement and other first responders.
Scale explains why the state acted. Waymo operates about 4,000 vehicles nationally and about 1,200 in the Bay Area, making it the largest robotaxi operator in the country and the company most of the complaints are about. TechCrunch reported that an investigation earlier this year found the company relying on first responders to move its vehicles by hand, and that Tesla is the only operator publicly saying it has remote staff able to take direct control of a car. Waymo and Zoox have both said they will comply with the new rules. A Waymo spokesperson said the amendments to the bill were important because they "ensure autonomous vehicle operators can still feasibly serve Californians."
Cortese framed the signing in narrower terms than the debate around it. California has welcomed the technology, he said, but the state cannot welcome it at the expense of public safety, and when a car crashes, breaks down or blocks a roadway during an emergency, there has to be clear accountability for it.
The first number the DMV publishes will be the one that matters
Nothing in the statute makes a robotaxi company faster before July 2028. The penalties cannot be collected until the chapter is operative, no city can sue under it before then, and the response-time standards that give the thirty-minute threshold its meaning do not exist yet. What exists now is a deadline, a data pipeline and a permit condition, and those are the instruments that will shape behavior in the meantime, because a company planning a fleet expansion has to model a future in which the department can refuse the expansion and publish its response times next to its competitors'.
That is a quieter kind of accountability than a fine, and in some ways a stronger one. A civil penalty that a city has to sue to collect, capped at $10,000 a vehicle, is a rounding error against the cost of a stalled fleet; the value of being ranked last in a quarterly state publication, on a metric that city fire departments read, is not. The legislature built a scoreboard and attached a fine to it.
What stays unpriced is the part of the problem that prompted the law in the first place. The statute begins its clock when someone asks the company for help. The fifty-three minutes that San Francisco first responders spent on hold happened before anyone could ask a technician for anything, and the vehicles that block a road for twenty minutes and clear themselves, which is most of them, never enter the calculation at all. California has decided to price the wait it can measure, and the next two years will show whether companies treat a published response time as a cost worth paying down, or as a number to be managed the way the fine is managed, at the smallest amount the rules allow.
Primary sources
- California Legislature, Senate Bill 1246, chaptered text, for the civil penalty amounts and who may sue, the thirty-minute threshold, the remote driver and local incident technician requirements, the DMV's record, publication, standards and permit duties, and the July 1, 2028 operative date.
- Office of Senator Dave Cortese, Major Victory for Public Safety as Accountability, Oversight, and Emergency-Response Standards Governing Autonomous Vehicles is Signed into Law, for the signing, the sponsors and supporting organizations, the Bay Area incidents cited from local reporting, and the senator's statement.
- TechCrunch, Robotaxi operators will face fines for blocking first responders, for Waymo's fleet size, the earlier investigation into first responders moving its vehicles, Tesla's remote operators, and the companies' responses to the law.