New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require fully autonomous vehicles operating in the state to use cameras alongside two other sensing technologies, most commonly lidar and radar. Because Tesla's Robotaxi system relies solely on cameras, the measure would effectively bar it from the state unless the company changed its hardware. If enacted, New Jersey would become the first state to write such a hardware mandate into law, and the move matters because it attempts to settle in legislation a long-running technical dispute that has, until now, been left to executives and engineers.

The bill's primary sponsor, Democratic state Senator Andrew Zwicker, a physicist, said the measure is about safety rather than targeting Tesla, arguing that the evidence does not yet show a single sensor type paired with software can match human drivers. The proposal would establish a three-year pilot programme requiring crash reporting, state authorisation, and at least 50,000 miles of supervised testing without a major incident before a human safety driver could be removed. Tesla's Elon Musk maintains that cameras with advanced AI are the safest and most cost-effective approach, and that extra sensors can create conflicting data, while rivals such as Waymo and Zoox, along with safety experts, argue that combining cameras, radar and lidar adds redundancy and makes driving safer.