Senate Transportation Committee

Dr Missy Cummings is with George Mason University Robert O the Dawn Project and Dylan Angelo individual crash survivor All of that noted on the official agenda for this hearing So welcome to all of you I see I have three of you Somebody still en route I guess We have... Oh, the fourth is testifying. Pardon? Dr. Cummings is virtual. Oh, virtual. Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Just making sure this is okay. Great. Chair Cortese, members of the committee, my name is Ariel Wolfe. I serve as general counsel to the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which represents the world's leading autonomous vehicle companies deploying AVs across the country. Thank you very much for having me here today to discuss the state of the AV industry and its role in California's transportation future. I have a few slides to accompany my remarks. I'm, of course, eager to answer any questions. You can stay as long as you need for that. First, shown here is a VIA's membership. We cover the gamut of companies that are building the autonomous vehicle future. Light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles, robo-taxis, delivery vehicles, auto manufacturers, and hardware and software suppliers and others. I say all that because it's important to understand the expanding ecosystem that is flourishing across the United States and here in California today due to the ingenuity of our nation's innovators and the promise of AV technology to solve real problems. Before we get deeper, though, I want to make one key point to avoid any confusion. People talk about the six levels of autonomy, and I will show that in a moment. But there are really just two technologies to focus on for this discussion. One, of course, is autonomous vehicles, and two, vehicles with driver assist technology. Autonomous vehicles drive the car without human driver intervention. In AVs, humans are the passengers, not the drivers. Driver assist technology requires a human driver to remain fully engaged, monitor the roadway, and be ready to take control of the vehicle at any moment. This tech is widely available in consumer vehicles today, like lane keep assist, automatic and emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control. You must be attentive at the wheel and keep your hands and eyes forward. This distinction matters both for safety and for public understanding. If a human has to be attentive at the wheel at all times, it is not an AV, regardless of how it's described or marketed. You may have seen these levels of automation before in the slide here. Given the time constraints, I won't go through this now, but I'm happy to return to this at a later time for any questions. Here in the slide is a generalized description of an AV. It shows the many sensors and technologies that are used by the automated driving system, or the ADS, to perform the driving task. One quick note here is that these sensors see beyond what the human eye can perceive in many directions all at once. The ability to synthesize all of this information simultaneously is what gives an AV a full picture of its surroundings. This is an image from a LiDAR unit on the left, a light infrared detection, light detection and ranging, I should say. and the one next to it is from a vehicle's object classification function. And the next few slides focus on the crisis we have on our roads today and will frame the rest of my remarks Two weeks ago this committee held a joint informational hearing that examined recent crash data The background memo for that hearing made clear that quote road injury is consistently the leading cause of death for children and young people ages 5 to 24 in California. There were 17,745 fatal and serious injury crashes in California in 2024, and California's rate of fatal and serious injury crashes is still far higher than it was 10 years ago. The committee's memo emphasized the central role of human behavior in these crashes, DUIs, distraction, fatigue, and excessive speed. And I would direct you back to that memo that lays out the grim statistics of human-caused fatalities. AV deployment is not an abstract policy debate. It is a response to a present and urgent public safety failure caused by human behavior. Some data already suggests that AVs have reduced serious injuries and crashes by 92%. We can either continue to rely on attempts to manage human behavior, or we can embrace technologies designed to remove the risks that our current system has struggled to control. AVs operate today on public roads across the country, as shown here, including here in California, with a strong and growing safety record. They are transporting passengers and delivering goods commercially in places like California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Michigan. The workforce opportunities created by the AV industry are diverse and expanding. These include service technicians, remote support and delivery personnel, and data collection specialists. Many of these roles do not require a four-year college degree, but do offer pathways to stable, high-quality employment. The AV industry also is an economic engine for California. In fact, one of our members, Zoox, has opened the first-ever serial production facility for purpose-built all-electric robo-taxis in the U.S. and will create hundreds of jobs in the the San Francisco Bay Area. California has been the birthplace of this industry and remains a global leader. Right now, the California DMV is finalizing updates to its AV regulations. The DMV's AV regulations already are the most stringent in the country. AVs represent a transformative advancement in transportation, one that is already saving lives and reinforcing California's position as a global leader in innovation. The AV industry is eager to work with the committee and all policymakers to achieve this vision. much and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

opportunity to speak to you today I do want to recognize that there are a lot of positive benefits to autonomous vehicles we may argue that driving assist systems. I do think they count as autonomy, even though they're partial autonomy, which we'll talk a little bit about later. And indeed, I want to start there. I have three very significant concerns, and I will first address the driving assist systems. They, as well as self-driving cars, rely on computer vision. This is very important because computer vision is a very unreliable technology and it especially a problem because unreliable technology in any autonomous vehicle ADAS or self car if it unreliable and you rely on a human but humans have a tendency towards complacency in vehicles then it especially problematic when the autonomy fails and then the human is not paying attention You're going to hear more about that from another witness today, but these problems mean that no ADAS vehicle should ever be allowed to operate in any operational design domain for which it was not explicitly designed for. Moving on to my second point. You've heard a lot here today about self-driving cars. There isn't such thing as a self-driving car anywhere in the world. All of them, all of them, all of them in California require significant human babysitting in the form of remote operations. And California, your self-driving cars are being controlled from people in the Philippines, people who do not have U.S. driver's licenses. This is very unsafe because the latency in the signals between California and the Philippines has and will continue to provide unsafe situations that puts the public at risk. These people need to be brought back to the United States and they need to have U.S. driver's licenses. My last point, it actually involves both ADAS and self-driving cars. And this revolves around, yet again, computer vision, a very unreliable technology. But this problem is the problem of hallucinations. These cars, again, cars with ADAS and self-driving cars, hallucinate. They see things that aren't there. This will often result in an emergency hard-breaking maneuver, which can and has led to accidents, can and will continue to kill people. If the state of California does not do something about addressing this phantom braking problem and you let self-driving trucks roll out on your highways, I assure you people will die. The people of California have been guinea pigs for the self-driving car community, and there are very serious problems, which we have data on, and we need more data to address, but we can't ignore these problems, and the public in California shouldn't be made to pay that price. I yield my time.

Are you able to hear me? Chairman and members of this committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. My name is Robert O'Dowd, and I'm a member of the Dawn Project, a public safety advocacy organization dedicated to making computers safe for humanity. But I am not just simply an unaffected advocate. I'm also the father of a two-year-old. And no parent should ever have to hear that their child was struck by an autonomous driving vehicle with software that was known to be defective, and then have to fight through years of litigation against corporate obstruction in order to reveal crash data that was hiding on their servers for years. I know that this is possible because a victim, Anguilo, is here with us today. Allow me to explain. Current law permits any company to deploy AI at scale on the roads with little to no oversight. Tesla Motors does this under the product names of Full Self Driving and Autopilot. This trail blazes a dangerous path for other actors to imitate. The incentives are clear. Push an autonomous driving intelligence onto our roads by disrupting labor and transportation and then selling it to safety-conscious Californians by repeating that it is safer than a human driver right now, today. However, the evidence has borne out that it is not, in fact, safer, so they have to exploit gaps in the law in order to avoid regulatory oversight and investigations into how their system works and designs. In the event of an accident, the manufacturer is allowed to protect information about the software's implications in the accident and then place all the remaining blame on the human operators. Any safety statistics regarding the operation of these vehicles comes through their own corporate marketing functions, cherry-picked and manipulated. Help us fix this problem by addressing these gaps in the law that allow self-driving software to operate anywhere with no independent safety validation. Victims harmed by these accidents? By the corporate Goliath in an uphill battle as they profit from selling this technology with no obligation to the truth. By far, the worst offender of all of this manipulation is Tesla. To date, Tesla has reported 59 fatalities to NHTSA involving full self-driving and autopilot. Over half of those fatalities were right here in California. We have provided video evidence that Teslas using full self-driving technology ignore school zones, stop signs, and closed roads. We have verified reports of Teslas using these features, colliding into emergency vehicles and first responders. However, under current law, fixing these mistakes are voluntary and at Tesla's own convenience. These are not edge cases. The scope and scale of these deployments are immature, are premature, and this constitutes a public safety hazard. Tesla promotes full self-driving by flagrant re-promoting that it will be ready, fully autonomous by the end of this year, a line that they have repeated every year for the last decade. but a nearly complete project should not still continue to have flagrant design omissions as well as safety critical defects. Litigation has revealed that Tesla knows about these capability gaps yet fights to conceal audible safety statistics. However, at this moment, I want to focus on one inexcusable failure. Consider the case of Tillman Mitchell. In November of 2023, the Dom project published a scathing report to the New York Times that the AIs and Tesla could not recognize the school buses, their stop signs extended. We informed Tesla, we informed the regulators, and no changes were made. Five months later, Mitchell was hit as he was exiting his school bus by a Tesla running autopilot, sending a child to the hospital with life-changing injuries. Now, this may come as a surprise, but these defects are still present in the versions on the roads today, and under current law, Tesla has no obligations to address them, opting to blame the humans every single time these defects manifest. It is unconscionable to allow millions of users to unwillingly enable a defective AI with crucial fixtures, without crucial fixes. I ask you, vanish this from our roads, never to see the light of day again. It has only been through the victims, such as Dylan here today, and during years of litigation, that we can establish this pattern of malfeasance. You have an opportunity to ensure that no more families need to fight to uncover information that is in the public's interest. We have two asks of this committee. Force any program controlling a vehicle to comply with Level 4 Autonomous Vehicle Disclosure Standards No more ability to hide no more ability to redact to hide failures No more hiding behind the legal fiction that is simply a level 2 driver assistant in order to place blame on victims. Second, mandate the prompt resolution of known safety defects in any software controlling steering and braking. Where these vehicles cannot be fixed, the software must be disabled. We cannot allow known defective systems to remain active on our roads any longer. members of this committee. Tesla operates under the arrogant assumption that this committee will change nothing and permit them to continue obstructing justice for their victims. The delay in justice is itself an injustice. Thank you and I look forward to answering your questions.

Mr. Chairman, The mic's not working. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for giving me the chance to speak today. My name is Dylan Angulo, and I flew here all the way from Florida for one reason, because I still believe my pain and Nibel's life can mean something if it helps protect other families from going through what we went through. I came here to honor Nibel Benavides Leon. The woman I loved, whose life was taken in an instant. And I came here to stand up for every victim and every family who should not have to bury someone or live the rest of their life broken. Because dangerous technology was allowed on public roads without enough rules, transparency, and accountability. On April 25, 2019, Nibel and I were standing on the shoulder of a road in Key Largo, Florida. a Tesla Model S operating with autopilot engaged, came through a T-intersection at about 62 miles per hour. The evidence showed the car recognized a stop sign, recognized us pedestrians, recognized the end of drivable space, and recognized our parked vehicle off the road, yet it still went straight through without stopping or warning the driver in time. Nybel was killed. I survived, but I did not walk away whole. I suffered a traumatic brain injury, a shattered pelvis, a fractured sacrum, and other severe injuries that changed my life forever. I live with permanent pain, and I walk like a broken old man. So when this technology is described as innovation, driver convenience, and the future of transportation, it is important to understand what that sounds like to a person like me. This is not a theory. This is not a branding issue. This is a death. This is a permanent injury. This is a real human cost. And that is why I came all the way here, asking for action before more families are destroyed. Tesla has had these vehicles on public roads for about a decade. The state may classify them as level 2 systems, but they are being marketed in ways that create the impression of full autonomy. Meanwhile, the public and Tesla's own customers have been unwilling participants in Tesla's real-world self-driving testing. Our public roads have become Tesla's test track. Tesla rushed this unfinished technology onto public roads while trying to lead the race to develop autonomous vehicles Without the safeguard the public deserves And in court we proved why that is so dangerous We proved these vehicles were not as safe as Tesla claimed We proved Tesla was not transparent with critical data, including failing to turn over the augmented video and crash data from the autopilot computer. We proved Tesla claims that these vehicles were safer than human drivers was not truthful. We proved Tesla ignored safety regulators and failed to meanfully geofence or limit this technology. That is why this is bigger than my case. Sadly, Nibel's story is not the only one. California knows this issue is not theoretical. And that is exactly why this state should be paying close attention and leading the way on regulation and accountability. To a pedestrian standing on the roadside, there is no meaningful difference between a so-called driver assistance system and a more advanced autonomous system. If the vehicle fails to brake when a human life is in front of it, the labels don't matter when the outcome is the same. And if this gap remains open, other families will go through what we went through. So I respectfully ask this committee and the state of California to help make sure Nibel's life leads to change by regulating this technology before more lives are destroyed. Please require real transparency when these systems crash. Please require preservation and disclosure of vehicle data after serious collisions. Please require safety limits, including restricting these systems from roads and conditions where they have not actually been proven safe. And please hold these companies accountable when they put the public at risk. This is not anti-technology. This is pro-human life. That is what responsible leadership looks like. Nibel never got a second chance. She never got to go home. She never got to grow older. She never got to live the life she deserved. I did get a second chance, but I have to live every day with the pain, trauma, and damage this technology left behind. So I am asking respectfully but urgently, please do not let more families pay this price before meaningful action is taken. Please hold these companies accountable. And please make sure Nibel's life and the suffering of other victims lead to change. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Sorry about your loss. I know how hard that is. My best friend, when I was in fifth grade, got hit by a car on a bike, lost my best friend in fifth grade, and my basketball teammate in tenth grade got in a car wreck. Car wrecks are just there's no words I could do moving forward. But I do have some questions for Mr Wolf When you drive a car it an incredible responsibility and accidents are happening all the time Is there data that talks about people who drive their cars themselves versus, you know, the AV cars? And do you have data that shows maybe one having more accidents than the other? Is there data out there that would enlighten us as a committee?

Well, a follow-up question. the testimony from is it Dr. Cummings or

she said that your autonomous vehicles are not done by computers but by people in the Philippines what's your response to that because you said you're trying to get away from human air but if humans are doing it in the Philippines you would still have the human air wouldn't you?

vehicle. So that would not be the case for level four, no one from the Philippines is controlling?

So my understanding is Tesla performs the same functions as the autonomous system, steering, braking, navigation. Why should it be exempt from the same testing reporting standards that are required for companies like Waymo? What would be your response to that?

Back to Mr. O'Dowd. Mr. O'Dowd, you mentioned, and I didn't catch it, Tesla had a certain amount of fatalities. What was the number? I was trying to write it down. I didn't get that. The number was 59.

And have you measured that versus normal accidents with, you know, just say a Toyota or how many accidents happen from Tesla versus some of the other cars that are on the road? In absolute scale or in relative to individual?

Could you get back to me because I would be interested. Again, we have to compare apples to apples. If a level two Tesla has so many fatalities and you have the same amount of cars on the other side, what would that comparison be? Because we're not starting from a position of zero. Yes.

Okay. I think I have one more. So last one from Mr. O'Dowd. You mentioned some of these failed to stop. From your experience or from your expertise, is it a learning curve issue or is it a fundamental failure with software from your perspective?

And that statement, are you talking about level 4 and level 2 or just level 2?

Mr. Chairman. Okay. Thank you. Any other members of the committee? We have a couple of questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think it is very important to clarify this, and I would agree. confusing because in part, perhaps because for a number of years there was the SAE levels of automation, zero through five, and that created a distinction. And that continues to be relevant for engineering. But the distinction between the two kinds of vehicles is really important. Whether a human is participating in any way, even just an expectation of taking back control, the industry does not consider that an autonomous vehicle And I think maybe the place to really draw the distinction is increasingly now because of federal government involvement there are going to be vehicles and there are some vehicles that do not have any manual controls in the vehicle at all And that, of course, is going to be a fully autonomous vehicle. There's no ability to drive it other than the vehicle itself driving. So that's, as you continue to have some level four vehicles with manual controls because of a federal motor vehicle safety standard issue. That presents some of the confusion. But that dichotomy, I think, is very important to have in place. Any company that is saying a human licensed, even if they're really doing very little in the end, that more and more of the vehicle is performing a driving task, if the expectation is to be able to take back control at a second's notice and to be attentive to the road, it's assisting that driver. It's not the vehicle. The human is not the passenger. Humans participating in that, and that's important to retain as a distinction, we feel, as the autonomous vehicle industry.

Yeah, I think that's right. And if I'm understanding the way this works, when that coded information has problems informing the autonomous vehicle as to how to navigate a situation, there's human assist on a remote level.

Well, there's an operational – thank you for the question. There's an operational apparatus around the deployment of an autonomous fleet. And that involves, of course, maintenance and everything that goes into managing a fleet. In the case of autonomous vehicle operation, and this is one of the interesting things about workforce development, there's an apparatus associated with the operations of that fleet that could involve in a situation where a vehicle that has been tested rigorously over many, many millions of miles of simulation on road testing, that encounters a situation that requires a human to point out something like that, that that still does occur. Of course, that learning, one interesting thing about the way that works is that learning in that instance gets pushed to all of the vehicles in the entire fleet for that autonomous vehicle. Unlike in the human driver situation, if we learn something in one case, that doesn't get imputed to all the other millions of drivers on the road as well. So those situations help the vehicles learn and the operations improve.

So, Chairman, it's a great question. So there's remote driving, which we said is not the case in autonomous vehicle. So that would present certainly. I think there are workforce issues to explore for remote operations. That's a discussion that's happening also in Washington. Same kind of line of questioning. I think it is important to look at those things. I know the companies have rigorous methods and workforce issues and operations that they put in place for those kinds of things. So I think it probably is a little bit different than an intoxicated person sitting behind the wheel of a car going 110 miles an hour on the road versus those situations. But to the extent that they require examination, I think the companies are forthcoming about that and certainly sharing information with NHTSA and other entities.

It's certainly an important issue that's being looked at by all the companies. I think, as a general matter, tend to look at the liability and see it as an area that can well be accommodated by existing tort law and apportioning liability in that respect. I think in a situation where there's a company that owns and operates and manages the entire fleet and the vehicle is fully autonomous and the human has no role, in some respects, depending on the facts of the case, it can be simpler than having then a human driver and trying to ascertain what happened. It would be the automated driving system to the extent that there were facts to indicate it was at fault. Of course, we see more overwhelmingly the opposite, that there's reason to believe that it's human drivers that are causing the issues and collisions. But to that extent, it can be simpler.

Well, I think it's an interesting point. I would say just on the insurance point, I know Swiss Re has looked at, done some studies, and has been able to corroborate a certain amount of data showing the diminution and the reduction of collisions and severe injuries and so forth as a result of AV deployment. I think topics like remote assistance, as long as I think it's contextualized as what it is and not conflated, as can happen because there's so many different things going on, conflated with remote driving or even more significant remote operations. Remote assistance is an important topic, and I know there would be important dialogue with DMV and the agencies and with lawmakers, of course, to help understand how we can provide assistance and information about how that works. And I appreciate the fact that, like so many things, the courts, you know, based on current case law, can easily sort out liability and comparative negligence and who has to pay and who doesn't have to pay. But I think from, again, from a consumer protection standpoint, there's the question of how much can you do to head off those kind of claims in the first place. We heard some of that testimony today. And granted, I think the testimony today was relative to a technology that's not involved in your particular association. I understand that. So that's not a pointed question. But it is a question about whether or not there should be more uniform standards than there is right now, whether or not that's a benefit to the industry. It's at large. Mr. Chairman, just very quickly, I would just say the industry strongly supports uniform standards. certainly design, construction, and performance at the federal level, which helps ensure that we can drive a vehicle from Washington, D.C. to Sacramento, not get stopped in between, but certainly other kinds of uniform standards, whether it's regulatory, legal regulatory, or engineering, or other kinds of policy, that is always helpful to not have that kind of patchwork of types of approaches.

Dr. Cummings, if you're still there? I am.

Sure. As a professor, I'm used to being taken out of context all the time. As a politician, we're used to changing context all the time. Absolutely. So to be fair, Ariel is right that there are two kinds of general remote operations. One is remote driving, and that is like video game driving. The other is remote assist. But don't be fooled. Remote assist is also remote control. So, for example, today, self-driving car companies, instead of driving the car with an accelerator and a brake pedal, they actually use keystrokes. They can tell a car, go forward five feet at five miles an hour. Go forward a half a mile at 20 miles an hour. So I really appreciated your conversation about standards because we are in the wild, wild west of this. It is not correct to say that remote assist is not control. It is control. And we need to understand that regardless of whether or not you're doing remote assist or remote driving, and the military learned this the hard way, you cannot do this from the Philippines safely. It incurs at least an additional two-second latency delay. On average, it could be much worse. And that two seconds is enough. It has caused an accident, at least one in California. There are others that are being looked at. So we know that the time delay from the Philippines, from the remote assistant, to the cars operating in California can cause accidents. They have yet to cause deaths, but it's just a matter of time. And with that said, you have any thoughts on how to standardize that human element, how to begin that process? Policy-wise, it's a common practice, for example, in the world we're in, to go look at best practices. I don't know if that's Waymo right now or somebody else and start there and try to build upon good work that's already been done by the industry. Is that the way to start here or is academia the way to start?

they could and should be learning from that. I do not think that Waymo has the best practices. Waymo is the company with the self-driving remote operations in the Philippines. This is unacceptable. As far as standards go, I was a senior safety advisor for NHTSA a few years ago, and I was trying to get my arms around the problem then. Federal government is slow to move. I absolutely think that this should be driven. The lead should be taken by the federal government. They are being slow to act. California, this is all happening in your backyard. I would wish that you would take the lead, make regulations that legislation, that remote operation, must bring those jobs back to California and also must make them have California driver's licenses. And in some sense, and just in fairness to Waymo, the general comment I was making or trying to make was they have a model and a system that essentially again from their own corporate standpoint requires the folks that are in the Philippines I don't know that we throw that model out the window but do we build on the practice

Well if I could say they aren't the only game in town The company that I would point you to for effective remote operations would be Zoox before I would point you to Wayne.

The most challenging part was that this was a new technology, that no one knew how to get the data from it or know how to prove that the car was at fault. No one knew. This was all new. I wasn't even aware that these cars were on the roads and they were driving themselves. The most challenging part was getting our hands on that data, and this is a year's long, it's going on seven years now. And that's what really changed the case was an anonymous hacker that was able to get the autopilot computer and get it and see what the car was seeing and processing through the augmented video. And at first, Officer Rizzo, Florida Highway Patrol, on June 19th, took the auto-file computer to Tesla headquarters, and Tesla gave it back to him saying there was nothing on this. It's just corrupted, and they gave him encrypted data that he couldn't even understand. That was incredibly hard of getting that data, and we finally got it, and that data showed that the car recognized pedestrian a stop sign that was 99 sure there was a stop sign at one point and the vision system was confused It thought my vehicle that was parked off the road was a bicycle a car an SUV a minivan and it went straight to the stop sign, ran a red light, ran over intersection signs, and all the system decided to do was abort autopilot a second and a little bit more than a second before impact. You know, it's not just to not fully report these crashes. There was like some order that was done where now they have to report any cars that are autonomous or on autopilot within five or ten seconds of a crash. to prove if the autopilot was at fault. That was very hard. It was also very hard, you know, seeing Elon Musk on news stations in the U.S. and even on his website, Tesla, where people buy cars, showing the car driving itself, stopping at stop signs, turning, navigating from point A to point B, and then come to the courtroom and say, no, this is just your grandma's cruise control. It just keeps you centered in the lane. And, I mean, it's a bunch of they're hiding behind loopholes. This whole level two and level five, I mean, this car is advertised as level five, and they're trying to be under level two. There needs to be change with that. this was very it's an incredible battle that we're going against going against Elon Musk and Tesla and you know we're currently on the appeal process and we're prepared to take this to the Supreme Court and that's not right for a family that lost a loved one and someone that was injured and you know we're here to hold them accountable and to hopefully encourage the regulators to put the right rules in place So thank you.

You know, to now I'm going to ask you an expertise kind of question,

What, you know, during the course of the trial, or I'm not asking what your attorneys told you. That's not appropriate. But did you have thoughts yourself about if only it were the law that X has to be available, this would have all been a lot different? What's X? I mean, firstly, these cars need to be fully tested before they're on the roads. You know, they just threw this car on the road, and they were learning as they were going with crashes that were happening, training the computer to not do it again, and we were pretty much guinea pigs. You know, there should be standards where automatically the data, the vision system, what the car is processing and seeing, not just a bunch of logs, which those are also important, but we need to see what the car was seeing and processing. You know, the highway patrol, the police officers, the lawyers, the judges, insurance companies, all should have access to that. This shouldn't be something where a lawyer or a police officer has to go to Tesla and ask them for it. It should be something that automatically they can get on their own. There's so many layers to this, but I'm here for the fight.

It looks like she would like the floor. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate this hearing on this very important issue. It's an emerging reality that we're faced here in the state of California, across the nation and the globe. My question is for Dr. Missy Cummings, who's on the line.

Do we know? So we're kind of, I feel like we're in between two places right now in that we need some policy parameters, guardrails that ensure that the public is safe. But also we don't want to stifle technology. What's that, do you have any recommendations, any insight as to what the guardrails should look like? could look like based on your research and expertise?

And so would you like to elaborate? I think it was brought up earlier on this concept of a black box, such as airplanes are required by law to have. Can you elaborate on that at all in your perspective of whether or not that would be beneficial, needed? And also, do you think that there is that self-driving system should be required to have a backup, some type of any type

Thank you.

Sure, Mr. Chairman. So I think the idea is a 92% improvement. What happens with the remainder and how do you set up guardrails with what should be done in those situations? I think it starts with the idea that in any situation the facts will determine liability But I think beyond that California regulatory structure has a permitting structure Not all states have that And so there always the idea of rescinding permits You know, Texas just updated its law in a certain respect for operations to have a process by which if there is a situation that the authorities have determined there's a reason to try and impound a vehicle or to make certain judgments about that to engage in that process and remove the authority based on the representations the company has made to the state. So I think there are a number of analogs. Our association has gotten involved in our model legislation across the country in thinking about that and certainly would be happy to have further dialogue on how to do it. Of course, the last piece of the puzzle is at the federal level. Anytime there's some issue or incident of a safety nature, NISA can and it does now repeatedly open those kinds of investigations.

Should be able to hear me now. Hi. Good afternoon, Chair Cortese and members of the committee. My name is Adam Wood. I retired from the San Francisco Fire Department in June of 2024 with 29 years of service, and I served on the Executive Committee of the Firefighters Union in San Francisco, Local 798, beginning in 2012. and I'm here representing that organization. I'm speaking to you today about our experience in San Francisco with autonomous passenger vehicles, also known as robo-taxis, and the challenges that they've presented to firefighters and other emergency workers in the city. There's been a number of issues, but the main problem that we've had with these vehicles as first responders is their tendency to shut down and immobilize themselves when confronted with an emergency scene or with emergency vehicles responding to a scene with lights and sirens. We've had AVs pull into the middle of an active shooter scene and shut down, thankfully without a passenger in that case. We've had them drive into a fire scene and park on top of a dry fire hose. That prevents that hose from being charged with water and used to extinguish the fire. We've had them block in an ambulance with a patient on board who needed to be transported to the hospital. We had one shut down directly in front of an apparatus door at a firehouse as the apparatus door was opening and a vehicle was preparing to leave for an emergency response, taking that vehicle completely out of the emergency response. We've had multiple cases on the narrow congested streets of San Francisco of an autonomous vehicle confronted with a responding emergency vehicle, shutting down, blocking all traffic, and making that route unpassable. And last December 2025 We had a massive power outage affecting the side of the city, traffic signals went out and we lost local cellular coverage. And the result was we had dozens of autonomous vehicles immobilized at the intersections throughout stopping traffic throughout entire neighborhoods from anywhere between 20 minutes to almost an hour. So the solution that the AV companies have presented to us as a city is they provided the city with a hotline that allows dispatchers to contact a remote operating center and have a remote operator move the vehicle. As you may expect from your own experiences with remote services, it's not been an effective solution. Often the dispatchers have trouble reaching the remote operating center, and once they do, the remote operators in some cases can still not move the vehicle. In the power outage in December, the city reported 31 calls from dispatchers to the hotline, with many of them put on hold for extended periods of time. One dispatcher was put on hold for 53 minutes. So ever since San Francisco became the California laboratory for autonomous vehicles, the San Francisco Fire Department leadership, both on the labor side and the command staff, have appealed to the autonomous vehicle companies and the CPUC to, first of all, slow down the deployment so that we could address these problems we were beginning to see in the field. And also, one of the key things we were asking for was a public safety manual override option that would allow a police officer, a firefighter, or a paramedic confronted with a stalled vehicle at an emergency scene or en route to move it without the intervention of a third party, a remote operator. We had hoped that what we considered to be a common-sense solution to the problem would be agreed to voluntarily by the companies. But the years have gone by, and here we are still seeking help to help us weigh in on crafting this technology so that it serves its purpose but still serves the best needs of the citizens we're trying to protect. I believe it is possible that we can come to a solution that gives us effective autonomous vehicles with no negative impact on public safety. But at this point in time, I don't think it's going to be possible without some element of the tool of local regulation so that we can weigh in and actually have an impact on what's done with this technology.

Thank you. We'll get to questions at the end of the panel. Who is next on the agenda? Brandon Sanchez, San Jose Police Department.

Thank you, Deputy Chief. Mr. Augusto.

Okay, thank you for being here. Mr. Gussman.

Thank you. Thank you all. We'll turn to the Senators to see if he has any questions or comments to start.

All right. Thank you, Senator. A question for Mr. Wood, I guess that's your title as retired. response times and i i don't know how long you've been out of that loop but um in the san zay area both as a county supervisor and as a council member i was quite aware of statutory or contractual response times that were set up for emts particularly coming out of either fire or private ambulance companies. Do you recall what those would typically be in San Francisco? And I'll give you, Deputy Chief, a chance to respond to if you know. I didn't come here knowing the answer, but I'm curious about how much time would be adequate response time for somebody responding from an autonomous vehicle company

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I do want to get into, you know, which city is meeting their response times, which isn't. I was more looking for a standard. I guess really in the context of this, what happens if you meet your response time and an autonomous vehicle is a part of the collision at the scene? So not delaying the response. I'm really asking you the question, how soon do they need to be there? If you were in your mayor's shoes or my shoes,

You get to the scene.

Well, that's the problem. As soon does that need to happen? We would need to have it.

So it's not so much the response time to the scene.

My recollection is that the Santa Clara County slash San Jose contract response time was somewhere around 8 1⁄2.

In other words, if you don't meet it, you don't get paid, basically.

But am I in the ballpark in terms of response?

Okay. But you're saying that information should be readily available at the state?

The 201? Certainly. Okay. Yeah. And how does dispatch you used one example of the many that you gave about a dispatch delay And I don know I also having been in county government and city government I understand there's people who do nothing but the ins and outs of dispatch. So if you don't know the answer, that's fine. But what I'm trying to understand is how does dispatch work now under the current scheme of things with an autonomous vehicle situation? because you alluded to a delay of 56 minutes or something like that.

So you're already late.

Okay.

And my understanding is there's technology out there, and it may be just my experience with my own non-autonomous vehicle, my EV, with OnStar systems and such that you're in an accident and immediately there's a dispatch notification that comes from that vehicle. I don't know if you're aware of that. Is that technology, at least generally, available through municipal systems? I don't mean provided by San Francisco, but is it compatible with San Francisco's dispatch?

Would it be helpful to have the technology and the autonomous vehicle notify its remote operator and the remote operator then notify dispatch?

I don't know if you're aware of the technology around dispatch in San Jose. I know it's a good system. Yes, we've got a guy, but what do you know about that? Yes, thank you, Senator, for the question.

Okay. If you learn anything more about that, the aftermath of this hearing, in fairness to all involved, please let us know. We'll certainly distribute that information to committee members. folks who are, again, later on dealing with bills and policy and trying to maybe fix some of the rules. Yes, Senator Sauer.

It sounds like, given the experience you have as a high-level first responder, it reminds me of the days I sat, I had a seatmate, John DeQuisto, the late John DeQuisto, who was a battalion chief in the day, retired, served on the city council, and we were having a similar conversation about fire apparatus access when blocked. And he said, he leaned over and said, it won't really matter because they'll just take the truck and move everything out of the way. But in the issue of an injury, we heard testimony earlier of an injury more than we've heard testimony from all of you of certain injuries that have occurred. And clearly that can happen again. And my concern, I'm just trying to get at the issue of, as the legislature is trying to work with the industry on what would be an appropriate response time standard that aligns with public safety standards, what would that be? And I think I have a general answer to the question. It sounds like it might be in the eight-minute range. And you made it very clear we can find that out right here at the state of California, so we'll go do that. Anything else, Senators? If not, I'm going to let this panel go. Appreciate all of you being here. Appreciate your testimony very much. It's added greatly to the hearing today and is informing a lot of people. I should mention, I think all the Sacramento folks here know this, but we've had people coming in and out. Of course, they're on other committees and multiple committees meeting today. In fact, I keep checking my text here to see when they're going to call me over to vote in the audit committee any time now. I'm going to have to leave for a few minutes. But just know that much like City Hall and so forth, this place is completely wired. We have staff and all the fours here watching on monitors listening members listening and people of course who are going to run back the tape afterwards and utilize your testimony hopefully for good things to happen So thank you The next and final panel on state regulatory agencies, I want to invite up Bernard Soriano, Deputy Director of Policy, Department of Motor Vehicles, Miguel Acosta, Autonomous Vehicles Branch Chief, Department of Motor Vehicles, and Tara Curtis, Director, Consumer Protection Enforcement Division, California Public Utilities Commission. Thank you all for being here. Welcome. and I'm going to go ahead and get you started. I see someone waving me, which probably means that I have to run over across the street and run back again. So I'll put one of the senators here in charge while I'm gone, but we'll get you started in five minutes each. And Mr. Soriano, since you were listed first, we'll call on you first. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Go ahead, Mr. Acosta.

including transportation agencies and first responder departments in cities like Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and San Francisco, and we've convened two statewide first responder roundtables to ensure operational concerns are fully incorporated. The new proposal establishes a path for testing and deploying heavy-duty autonomous vehicles and strengthens the department's safety oversight. It adds more detailed and frequent reporting including vehicle immobilizations system failures heartbreaking and aligned federal crash reporting requirements and expands the Department's enforcement tools. It also implements Assembly Bill 1777 by requiring AVs to respond appropriately to emergency geofence messages, comply with law enforcement direction, and support first responders when an override system is present. The rulemaking also creates a formal process for law enforcement to notify the department and manufacturers when an AV is involved in a moving violation. California's approach continues to align with the federal model where manufacturers self-certify compliance with federal motor vehicle safety standards or receive exemptions through NHTSA while the state oversees driver licensing, vehicle registration, insurance, and operational safety. The department currently administers three AV permit types, testing with a safety driver, driverless testing, and deployment. Today, 28 manufacturers hold driver testing permits, six hold driverless testing permits, and three are authorized for deployment. Under existing regulations for testing with a safety driver, manufacturers must operate light-duty vehicles that meet federal standards or hold a NHTSA exemption. They must maintain $5 million in insurance, report collisions within 10 days, submit annual disengagement reports, and ensure their test drivers have clean driving records. Driverless testing carries similar requirements but requires a defined operational design domain, meaning speed, roadway type, weather constraints, time of day operations, a communication link to a remote operator, and a law enforcement interaction plan. Deployment builds on these standards by allowing manufacturers to receive compensation and requiring consumer education for vehicles sold to the public, as well as continued communication capabilities and an ODD description that reflects actual testing performance. The department maintains strong oversight through ongoing incident review, data reporting, and post-permitting enforcement. DMV has issued three revocations and 14 suspensions since 2014, such as the 2023 suspension of Cruze's driverless testing and deployment permits in San Francisco and the 2021 suspension of Pony.ai's driverless testing permit following a system failure-related crash in Fremont. California's regulatory framework supports the continued development of autonomous technology while prioritizing roadway safety, compliance with state law, and safe interactions with other road users. We appreciate the opportunity today and welcome any questions you may have. Thank you very much for your testimony. We'll move right on to you, Mr. Curtis, and hear what you have to say. And then depending upon when the chair gets back, he may have some questions for you. But if he doesn't, we're going to go right to public testimony, and then we'll come back and answer questions afterwards. Okay? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. My name is Tara Curtis. I'm the Director of the Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division at the California Public Utilities Commission, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak today about the Commission's role in regulating autonomous passenger service in California. The Commission's authority focuses on passenger service, ensuring that companies can safely transport members of the public for hire. We do not regulate all autonomous vehicle activity. Our responsibility is limited to passenger transportation including ride services as they commonly referred to in the public Private use delivery services and other non operations are outside of our jurisdiction Passenger safety is our foremost priority and shapes how we design and implement the permitting framework. Under the Commission's permitting framework, companies must meet the requirements that apply to transportation charter party carriers, such as limousines and tour buses, in addition to autonomous vehicle-specific requirements. Autonomous vehicle companies that seek to offer passenger service may apply for either pilot or deployment authorization. In both contexts, companies may apply for permits to operate with or without drivers. And commercial passenger service is only permitted once an operator satisfies the Commission's deployment requirements. Safety oversight does not end once a permit is issued. Operators must continue to demonstrate that they can safely transport members of the public and comply with all applicable rules. As part of this ongoing oversight, permit holders are required to submit safety plans and operational data and comply with all reporting requirements. The Commission monitors operations, reviews complaints, and follows up when safety concerns arise. We may request additional information, conduct inspections, and take enforcement actions when necessary. When concerns are identified, staff may open investigations and issue citations or notices to cease and desist or other enforcement orders. The Commission may also initiate formal enforcement proceedings, which can result in corrective actions, financial penalties, or permit suspension or revocation. These enforcement tools enable the Commission to ensure compliance with permit conditions, reporting requirements, and passenger safety obligations. We also coordinate closely with other regulators where our responsibilities overlap, including federal and state agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles. While the DMV oversees vehicle safety and operation on public roads, the Commission's role focuses on passenger service. This coordination ensures that safety issues are addressed comprehensively. As autonomous vehicle passenger service continues to evolve, the Commission is actively updating its regulatory framework through a rulemaking opened in August of 2025 following the conclusion of the prior proceeding. Given how quickly the industry has changed, this rulemaking is focused on ensuring the framework keeps pace by strengthening safety requirements, clarifying accountability, and improving transparency in data reporting. Ultimately, our goal is that autonomous vehicle passenger service operate safely under a clear and enforceable framework. Our role is not to endorse technologies or pick winners, but to ensure that when companies transport members of the public, they do so under strong oversight and that we can act if problems arise. Thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions. Great. Thank you. Senator Arakeen, do you have any questions? Okay. So I would imagine the chair will have some questions for you. One of the questions I have is, you know, it seems like the structure of accountability is in place, and maybe the breakdown is sometimes what happens out in the field, which is normally the case. We were hearing some testimony about, you know, delayed responses, delayed time when they try to call the company and they can't get a hold of them or they're put on hold. How are those issues handled by WSBAs? Every department is notified. That's a great question. So as I mentioned, our framework includes a robust incident review. If we have incidents where, for example, there's a report of some blockage, where let's say blocking a fire engine or police or those kinds of things, we meet with the manufacturer to try to understand that situation, fully understand all the facts associated with it, and in some cases ask the manufacturer how they're going to remediate that situation. Every type of situation is different. There may be a reason for that particular situation, but if the manufacturer cannot remediate that particular situation, that is when our enforcement tools kind of come up. And for each of you, have we had a lot of incidents where you've been getting complaints from the various public safety agencies or whatever regarding incidents with autonomous vehicles. Yes, we've developed great relationships with the locals. We meet frequently with LADOT, San Francisco, Santa Monica. For a period of time, we were meeting very frequently with SF Fire to understand some of these incidents. we would actually obtain, they had reporting of these types of situations that we would review. They'd send them to us, we'd review them, we'd talk with the fire department to understand them better, and then we'd meet with the actual manufacturer and go over those particular situations. So we had a pipeline in place to hear from both parties and to try to make sure that these issues are being resolved. And I would just add as well, I don't have exact figures on those numbers of complaints or outreach we have, but what I would say is that we have a process like the DMV to review every single complaint that a member of the public reports to the commission, and that is a contact information that's available to the public on our website. In addition, when we see incidents reported to us or through news media or other means, those are also issues that we follow up on. We inquire for more information from the providers. So I'm sorry I don't have the exact – I was going to say, would you classify the volume as light, moderate, or all the time? Yeah. In other words, you've got to hire three people to answer all the calls. Yeah, well, I do appreciate that in the past we have requested staff resources related to our oversight of AV and been granted one or two analysts over the past six years, I believe. So that has happened concurrently with the growth in the industry. And so it's not an overwhelming amount for our staff capacity at this time. Thank you. Yeah, I would say the same thing. Okay. All right. At this time, what we'll do is we'll take public testimony. If you guys want to line up at the microphone there and get all of your comments organized in your mind into about a one-minute soundbite, that would be great. We're going to try and get you out of here by 4 o'clock-ish. Hopefully the chair will get back here by then. If not, you guys are trapped until he gets back. Go ahead with your comments. You got – oh, try to take about a minute or so. You don't have to take a whole minute. I just want to make sure you know that. Okay. Good afternoon, committee. I'm Mark Vuksevich from Streets for All. I want to first and foremost appreciate this hearing for happening, I think this is an important topic. I also want to stress that we do not have an adopted AV policy framework but there are some things that we do believe and I want to share those We do believe that AVs as a whole are very safe and could potentially bring a new age of street safety We also believe that companies like Tesla, who are in the ADAS Level 2 system, have flagrantly lied to the consumer, and that has led to death and destruction on our roadway. We think that agencies like DMV and CPUC are not necessarily adequate for regulating the topics of AVs and building the public trust that these topics deserve. We think AVs are not necessarily the future of cities because we think geometrically cities still require public transportation, walking and biking, but we think they could be more of the future for suburbs and suburban transportation. Lastly, there are substantial questions that arise when it comes to questions of parking, congestion and land use. If I go to a city and want to go get ice cream and tell my AV to go circle the block for 20 times while I go get ice cream, what does that do to our downtowns and to our cities and to our urban places when everyone is doing that? I think that leads to questions of congestion pricing and parking pricing to deal with the negative externalities. Appreciate the committee for taking the time. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, everybody. My name is Janice Jackson, and I thank you guys for listening to our concerns. Once again, my name is Janice Jackson. I'm a member of the California Gig Workers Union. I live in Sacramento, and I've been driving for 10 years. I'm here because of my concern about AVs. AVs haven't been yet started in Sacramento, but I see them on our streets and now soon to start operation. And what concerns me is all that I have heard from other drivers from the Bay Area. and how they have ran lights, blocked traffic, and caused accidents and hitting animals. I haven't experienced any of this, but AV companies need to be held to a higher responsibility for all of the things that I've just mentioned. And as drivers, we are held responsible for those, so they should be as well. Thank you. Thank you very much, ma'am. Thanks, Speaker. Good afternoon. I'm Peter LaRome, one of you also the Bay Area Council. We are here today to strongly support the continued safe deployment of autonomous vehicles as a critical pillar of our state's economic and transportation infrastructure. And this innovation comes with greater safety for drivers, pedestrians, and others along our streets and roads. AVs are the only vehicles on the road that provide 100 percent data transparency. And in light of the committee's rightful recent attention to traffic fatalities, Golden State companies are stepping in to lead the way on solutions to road safety. While the state struggles with repeat offenders on the road, the AV industry is continuing to provide a safer alternative for Californians to get around. But if we move to a patchwork regulatory environment, we risk a fragmented system that isn't just a hurdle, it's a de facto ban. We believe the DMV and CPUC are the appropriate bodies to maintain rigorous, uniform safety standards. We need one rule of the road for the entire state to ensure this technology can scale, operate reliably, and safely serve our residents. It is also important to differentiate AVs from the driver assist industry. There is a substantial difference in safety performance, operations, legal liability, and insurance between SAE Levels 2 or 3 vehicles and fully autonomous driverless vehicles. Level 4 or fully driverless vehicles are very different from the operations technology and functionality of driver vehicles Policymakers should not conflate the performance of one with the other Can you wrap it up pretty soon? Yes. Thank you. Just to remain a global leader in innovation, California must choose a unified statewide path forward that prioritizes both safety and growth. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker. you have 10 seconds he used most of you no i'm just kidding you you go you go do what you need good afternoon my name is vikash shunker and i'm a member of the california gig workers union i'm a resident of fresno and i've been driving for uber and lyft for the past 10 years on and off i'm here today because i'm concerned about how avs are going to affect my community and my fellow drivers even though they're not there yet as a driver in the central valley and also as a former journalists, I've seen firsthand the impact of red light crashes and unsafe driving in our communities, virtually none of which were the fault of the professional safe and sober drivers that AVs are actually seeking to replace. As a driver, there are already too many makeshift memorials on our busy intersections, too many families affected by inattentive and unsafe driving. I mean, even one of our intersections has a YouTube channel dedicated to footage of red light crashes and, you know, people running red lights. AVs are coming to our communities. We know this. And as a driver who takes pride in getting residents and visitors to their destination safely, we need to ensure that the nightmares of AVs that we're seeing in other places don't become our stories as well. Don't allow the replacement of safe professional drivers with unaccountable and incomplete AVs. Thank you. Thank you, sir. All right. My name is Mustafa El-Amin. I'm also a, I'm representing, I'm with the California Gig Workers Union. I am also from Fresno, California. I've been a ride share driver for going on 10 years now. So as a member of the California Gig Workers Union. As a ride-shirt driver, I take pride in transporting my passengers in a safe manner, providing an excellent service that I can provide for them as well. And AVs, they're not been released in our area as of yet, but it's coming. And I already know that I'm not against innovation, but right now, innovation is kind of outpacing the legislation. So there has to be a framework for things to roll out in a safe manner. As a ride-seer driver myself, there's a certain criteria that I have to abide by. I have to meet the legal framework that's put on myself, and I have consequences if I violate any of these types of rules. So we just want to make sure that AVs, as they get rolled out, they have the same considerations in mind. You know, especially if it comes to we're operating in the same space that I operate in as well. So I want to make sure that, you know, just supporting bills that are going to create a legal framework so that AVs have the same accountability as the human drivers. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Chair and members, Alicia Priego here on behalf of the Chamber of Progress. Thank you for this important hearing. AVs are a part of a broader mobility ecosystem that augments and expands good jobs across our economy With smart safety policy and intentional workforce development California can capture these benefits for working families across the state and continue to lead with policies that support forward-thinking innovation. This shift won't happen overnight, and rollout is expected to unfold over a decade or so, giving time for this transition. AVs create indirect employment across infrastructure and construction, energy and utilities, local services, and expanded logistics and retail activity. I did want to touch on one issue that hasn't been covered today, is that AVs can help transform paratransit, offering flexible curb-to-curb service that could help as many as 4.4 million people with disabilities access jobs nationwide. The Public Policy Institute of California has emphasized that reducing transportation barriers, expanding job training and strengthening employer supports are essential to improving labor market access for Californians with disabilities. And these are goals that AVs can help advance. Thank you for your time and appreciate the ability to comment. Thank you very much. Next speaker. Thank you, Vice Chair and members. My name is Ashanti. I'm the Director of State Policy here at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. SVLG represents Silicon Valley's most innovative companies, including leaders in autonomous vehicles. We're here today to urge the committee to recognize the distinction between fully autonomous vehicles and driver-assist systems. This distinction matters. By the state's own determination, vehicles with Level 2 driver-assist technology are not classified as autonomous vehicles, and conflating them with Level 4 fully driverless vehicles misrepresents the technology, the safety record, and the regulatory framework. The safety data is clear. Published data from Waymo shows that across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, and across all crash types, fully autonomous vehicles are delivering 80 to 100 percent less reductions caused by distraction, impairment, and speeding, which are the leading causes of death for roughly 40,000 traffic deaths Americans suffer each year. These results are consistent across all four cities and all severity levels. This is not a localized advantage. It is something that is a systemic gain. We believe that this represents the most significant advancement in road safety in recent memory. The regulatory framework matches that promise. California is building the most rigorous AV oversight in the country, with the DMV finalizing autonomous truck regulations that go above and beyond what the legislature had previously required. at a time where the legislature is rightly focused on road safety. Silicon Valley is delivering real, measurable solutions. We ask the committee to let the data guide the policy and protect California's role as a global leader in autonomous vehicles. All right, thank you. We are rapidly running out of time, so if we can get your comments in, I appreciate it and keep them succinct. Thank you. Thank you. Elmer Lazardi here on behalf of the California Federation of Labor Unions. I just want to state that there are over half a million workers who are dry for a living in California. especially in delivery, freight, passenger service, public transit, et cetera. And commercial drivers have the expertise and training to navigate the complexities of California's roads because they're licensed to do so. And yet companies are looking to increase profits with AVs at the expense of those workers by attempting to eliminate jobs entirely. Driverless vehicle deployment has been expanding in very visible ways, as has been mentioned throughout today. And we want to ensure that as aviate technology is expanding into more industry, and more heavy-duty uses, people are aware of the threat of the job loss and economic displacement that is becoming more pressing, especially industries like heavy-duty delivery, agriculture, and construction. We at the Labor Fed want to ensure that we are updating our laws to meet the challenges of our 21st century, especially as they relate to workers' technology rights and how those technology and technological advancements are changing the scope of work, and AVs are no different. So we just want to ensure that workers remain at the forefront of these discussions and that we relate that technological advancements are not new. We've heard about the advancements of so-called innovation, but it is the workers who are going to be bearing the brunt of these changes, and we want to make sure that if we care about protecting workers and their dignity, that they are at the forefront of these discussions. Thank you very much. Next and last speaker. Good afternoon. Matt Hedich with the Transport Workers Union. Thank you for an opportunity to discuss AV policy in California. The Transport Workers Union represents bus operators and dispatchers and other transit safety professionals at SF Muni. While the Transport Workers Union is not opposed to driver technology that aid a driver in the performance of their jobs, we welcome blind spot monitoring, lane departure, and auto braking technologies. We are opposed to technologies that replace a human operator, a well-qualified human operator. Bus and transit operators provide critical safety component in our city buses in San Francisco. These are good middle class and union jobs, and our members wish to continue in these roles as safety professionals for the future. We thank you for your time. And thank you very much. That exhausts our speaker role. So I've been asked to go and put the committee in recess until the chair returns. So he could potentially – whoops, is he here? There he is. And here's the chair to ask you questions. Thank you very much for your guys' attention and your patience today in testifying on this. And with that, Chair Cortese will be finishing up. We've already gone through public testimony. Okay. I'm at a disadvantage of the legislature's own making here, not having heard your presentations. and I apologize for that. I'll go over them afterwards digitally because they are important to me. I do want to ask you kind of a question that is really general and you know is a perfectly fine answer. But you heard some of my questions, if not all of them at least, by sort of the osmosis of being in this room to the previous panels in terms of things like response times and those kind of regulatory issues. Is there anything there that you would comment on, either from the DMV side or the CPUC side? I guess what I'm saying is I would certainly welcome your thoughts on any of those questions that I brought up in terms of the need for uniform standards, regulation of backroom operations, response time issues, and whether there should be affirmative I guess I was implying there might maybe there should be some sort of affirmative dispatch communications Has any of that been you know come to your attention in your own agencies I can start. Yeah, well, I can certainly start, Mr. Chair, and then Miguel can provide some of the details. But we are aware of the incidents that have occurred, and Miguel can go into the actions that we have taken. I will say that I'd like to point out that we're not adverse to pulling the levers that are available to us as far as enforcement. For example, we took action against crews when it was appropriate to do so. We took action against other companies as well. So it's not something that we take lightly. We take our responsibility very seriously to ensure that the motoring public is safe, and we feel like the regulations provide that vehicle for us to do so. That being said, these incidents that have occurred are very much on an operational level, and we also have looked into those incidents and worked with the companies, worked with the first responders, worked with the people who are affected by them, so that we get a clear understanding about what had happened. And then that helps inform us moving forward. So, Neil? Yeah, I would just like to add that the new regulations that we're going to be, we've developed and we're looking to actually adopt have additional enforcement tools. So currently right now we have the enforcement tool of suspension or revocation of a permit to the operating authority. We're actually looking for additional enforcement tools that would allow us to actually potentially restrict, so give us a little bit more ability to target potentially certain areas of an operational design domain, a geographic location, and give us, again, more tools to enforce incidents occurring in a variety of ways. Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think the only other thing that I would add is, and you had missed the earlier presentation, but appreciate the question and the opportunity to clarify the Commission's regulatory role over autonomous vehicle passenger services specifically. I would say that a lot of the issues and topics that came up in the discussion earlier today are issues that we have heard from the public as well. And so I thank you again for the opportunity to kind of clarify our role and the DMV's role over those types of topics. Just a couple more specific questions, and I appreciate the two. Like I said, I'll go over your prior comments. Because my own observation, and I alluded to it earlier, is that since the days of Henry Ford, there was this combination. And it probably didn't go exactly back to that date. But generally speaking, going back to the time of the mass production of the automobile, pre-autonomous vehicles, obviously, there was always been this blend, as far as I know, of state agency regulatory control, especially over licensing and registration, the ability to revoke licensing and registration, which still exists today. We've had DMV here and talked about those things recently. And yet there still despite the state agencies occupying so much of the field there still this local regulatory process that basically seems more operational in many ways right Can you, you know, what do you do? Can you make a right turn from, somebody was talking about seeing an AV making a left turn or right turn from the center lane. And typically, you know, those may or may not be state motor vehicle code issues, but typically the enforcement and, you know, the local ordinance making around whether you do that in the airport approach or whether you do that on a particular frontage road or street, my experience is, you know, in a stack of local ordinances that have been adopted, you know, by many cities. within the framework that the DMV allows and perhaps the CPU see on things like taxi service and things like that. Are your agencies themselves opposed to some level of complementary local ordinance-making, rule-making, regulatory process on just day-to-day congestion and driving issues? and I get it you may not be able to speak on behalf of the entire I'm asking you to speak on behalf of the executive branch being an executive agency here I'm really just asking is there would there be a fundamental reason with autonomous vehicles to not have that state slash local blend of control is there something I'm sort of missing there You're right. It's a question that's difficult for us here to answer on behalf of the executive branch. And from the standpoint of what we are responsible for is ensuring that those vehicles are safe to be operated on California's roadways, all California roadways. And so we have to ensure that what we put down in a regulatory fashion does exactly that. And so we look at things such as obeying all of the rules of the road at a state level. So if there are some items that are at a local level that also need to be conformed to, That would be an expectation that we would also have because it encompasses the safe operation of those vehicles. No different than us licensing, Miguel, myself, yourself, and the expectation that we would have that you would obey the rules of the road regardless of where you are in the state. Right. And we were having a little sidebar, a couple of us over here just before the hearing started, that this is one of the few areas of machine learning, you know, AI-related stuff, if not completely AI-driven technology that's coming along, emerging, and already on our streets. but but it's also an area that we've regulated before so much of what we encounter again speaking as one legislator these days is you know falls into the category of never seen it before and we really have to start with a blank slate maybe like everybody did in Henry Ford day How are we going to deal with this? But we have this experience with motor vehicles in terms of the regulatory side of it where we've had that blend. It seems to have worked well. It seems even with us very deficient, less than 92% safer human drivers, when I pull over on Highway 5 into Stockton, I know there are different rules, local rules, than when I pull off in Tracy or eventually make it all the way to San Jose. I mean, my brain is capable of computing at least that far. You know, I know the basic rules that the DMV has promulgated, and I don't have to worry too much about CPUC, but I also know what to look for. As soon as I come into a local town or a city, a rural road, a scenic highway, I know what to look for. It seems to me autonomous vehicles can adapt to, you know, local nuances as well. But if you disagree with that, and that's more of a technical question, not a philosophical question about the administration of the executive branch or your agency, that there's a place that sounds like what you were saying is there may be a place for local rulemaking of some kind to complement the larger process that you're in charge of. Yeah, Mr. Chair, I don't disagree with you at all. I'm certainly not an AI expert, but I would anticipate that through machine learning and different AI technologies, that that learned behavior, that learned methodology that you and I go through would be transferable in the machine world. I'm not sure exactly when that would happen, but I can envision that that would be the case. All right. We'd love to certainly have a cooperative relationship with your agencies. I think I can speak on behalf of the committee, at least here, in terms of fleshing out those kinds of issues going forward, much easier and much quicker to work collaboratively than, and that was the nature of my question. Is there potential for collaboration there with the DMV, for example, on trying to get there as opposed to the legislature itself post some kind of a tragedy or, you know, based on some of the fact patterns that we have, just putting legislation out there that may or may not align with your thinking as to what should happen in terms of the local side of things. And, you know, having come from local government, and I'm very confident in cities and counties' ability to deal with the nuance of their own congestion management, where taxi stands should be, where rideshares should show up or not show up. It seems to be very difficult for us to, either you or the legislature, to rule-make or to legislate from this level, from a singular capital in Sacramento. Any further comments on that?

All right. That's appreciated, very much appreciated. Have there been, the last thing is, and I mentioned it in my first broad question, but have you had discussions specifically about maybe what should happen in terms of uniform dispatch and response standards when it comes to first responders? We had a lot of first responder testimony today. I'm just wondering if that's come up in either of your agencies as something to look at.

I apologize if you've already testified on that one.

And any plan yet for how to deal with the actual individual, this comes back to the local side of things, the actual individual dispatch centers, meaning obviously first responders are dispatched now from these sort of centralized, especially in the urban areas, but centralized dispatch centers that are getting police and fire and ambulance out on a 911 call. So any thoughts yet or developed yet in terms of how you might or how we might interact with them? You know, again, does it come into the area of they know what they're doing, they should be empowered to work within a framework that we set up, or we tell them exactly what we need and put that in our regulations or none of the above I think one of the things is we hoping to get some more data on that Okay And as these AVs scale in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles

Okay. Last question. The different nomenclature that I was questioning before, I was hoping by the end of this committee hearing to understand it all better. I think I accomplished that much. Has there been any discussion about just getting the nomenclature on the CNPG? I understand about the Tesla, the modification to FSD and making sure it's labeled as unsupervised or rather supervised. But it seems like at some point this should all be consolidated into basically a couple of definitions, a couple of glossary terms in terms of what we're dealing with out there because there's a lot of redundancy in the four or five terms that we heard. Is that something that you're working on?

Yeah.

Is that something that would find a home at CPUC type A type B type C and that it That what we have out there Yeah I appreciate the question

Yeah, just an example of that anecdotally is during the interim recess, kind of in trying to do some homework before we started up this new year, I paid a lot of visits to manufacturers. And without naming names, one of the things that I was told during one of those visits was we, Manufacture X, are going to see this point to a vehicle. We'll be using this as a robo-taxi in conjunction with another firm that's already in the passenger service. So we're entering not a merger but a contract to deploy what we manufacture to a company that's in the service delivery side. They refer to it as a robo-taxi even though the car already has a name, a model, and everything else. That can be confusing from a consumer protection standpoint, especially given if a company's taking what you guys would call level two and referring to that. And I know, again, that that's been a problem, as we just talked about. How much of a problem is, sorry about this as being the last, last question, but how much of a problem with all of this is hey it important to honor manufacturers terminology but it even more important to utilize consumer protection against marketing something that isn really what it is And, I mean, if you can adopt those rules, there's plenty of attorneys out there who will enforce them under consumer protection laws, but we haven't seen much of that, and I guess that's what I'm asking for, asking about. Does that come from our side or does that come from your side, legislative or agency side?

Yeah, and editorial comment before we close. So often it's been the case in California when it comes to motor vehicle regulation of any kind, including air quality issues, that we can't wait for a national uniform policy nomenclature. We have to be the ones to establish that basically by our own actions. So hopefully that kind of thinking prevails here, and we're not both on the agency side and the legislative side. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you to the folks who stuck around. I understand public comments already done. Again, I apologize for the delay that I fell into running over to vote on four audits in the other building. But all that's done now, and we appreciate your time, and I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the day. I want to thank our committee staff for organizing all of this. I think it was useful and it will help people very much here down the road on the policy side.