Tesla Calls It a Ban. The Bill Names No Company.

On S-1677 / A-3968, the New Jersey autonomous vehicle pilot, point and counterpoint.

Tesla is asking New Jersey residents to email the Legislature and oppose S-1677 and A-3968. The email makes five arguments.

I read the bill, audit AI systems for a living, and spent years documenting where autonomous vehicle oversight fails. And here’s what the bill actually says, and what Tesla left out of its email blast.

Let’s start with the claim everything else rests on. Tesla says the bill specifically bans Tesla.

Read the text. The bill names no company. It defines an autonomous vehicle tester and applies the same rules to every one of them: Waymo, Zoox, Wayve, Tesla. A company-neutral safety standard is not a ban. It is the floor.

So, what is this really about?

Autonomous vehicles are coming to New Jersey. But that’s not the question. The question is whether YOU can verify they are safe before one carries a passenger, and whether you have the data to act when one fails.

And I built the answer already. Prepared for the Mayor of London, my London Autonomous Vehicle Safety Standard sets five consent conditions a transport authority can require before any operator carries a paying passenger. The same five apply here:

• Crash reports within 24 hours when the automated system was engaged.
• Monthly disengagement data showing how often the system fails and a human takes over.
• Pedestrian detection accuracy tested against New Jersey's actual demographics, not Phoenix's.
• Full crash narrative disclosure, no redactions.
• A written infrastructure resilience protocol specifying what every vehicle does when the power goes out.

That last one is not theoretical. In December 2025 a substation fire cut power to a third of San Francisco. Waymo's fleet stopped in intersections, blocked emergency routes, and had to be towed. The mayor called the operator's CEO personally to clear the streets. There was no protocol and no direct line. Tesla's email does not say a word about what its fleet does the night New Jersey's grid fails. The bill should require an answer before launch, not after a crisis. On the detection point, peer-reviewed research found a 7.52% accuracy gap between light-skin and dark-skin pedestrians across eight automated detection systems, rising to nearly 10% at night. New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in the country. The bill's pedestrian detection requirement is the reason that gap gets measured here instead of discovered after someone is hit.

The Ask

To my fellow New Jerseyans: Read the bill (if you don’t want to read the entire text, this document is a good summary), read Tesla’s statements and then think about how it really impacts NJ. Make the decision based off of your assessment not Tesla’s marketing blast.

To NJ elected officials: Keep the bill technology-neutral, which it already is. Keep the supervised testing phase and add the five consent conditions above as a requirement before commercial service. Then watch who objects.

Waymo published more than 170 million driverless miles of peer-reviewed safety data and has every reason to support a rigorous New Jersey standard. Tesla redacted its own crash narratives as confidential business information, then unredacted them only this year under pressure. The operator who publishes its data first owns the trusted standard. The operator who fights crash reporting is telling you what its crash reports would say.

New Jersey has something San Francisco did not: advance warning, consent authority, and time. Use all three before the first robotaxi carries its first passenger.