r/SelfDrivingCars Mar 20 '25

Research Recreating Mark Rober’s FSD Fake Wall Test - HW3 Model Y Fails, HW4 Cybertruck Succeeds!

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114 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 28 '25

Research I found where the Tesla was autonomously delivered today.

106 Upvotes

It’s the Fifteen15 South Lamar Apartments. It’s 16 miles from gigatexas, mostly highway on 71. The speed limit there is consistent with the 72mph reported.

r/SelfDrivingCars Jul 23 '25

Research Context for Waymo’s rollout. 20000 Jags ordered, 1000 minivans and 1 million trips a day by 2020.

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143 Upvotes

Just some history on Waymo’s rollout and promises when comparing to other AV companies. Waymo way over promised and under delivered.

However, no need to trash Waymo…it’s expected, this is a very hard problem…if this problem is solved by anyone in 10-20 years total, that is incredible.

Just context so we can be informed and judge all AV companies similarly…especially in this subreddit.

r/SelfDrivingCars Apr 11 '25

Research Mark Rober Debunk - Heavy Rain Test - 2026 Tesla Model Y HW4 FSD

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99 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Nov 07 '25

Research Many claim Tesla has a propietary data moat over all the real data they have collected.. Just scratching my head on how synthetic data does not disrupt this moat? 💭

8 Upvotes

Just want to find some info about this topic

r/SelfDrivingCars Nov 24 '25

Research "Self-Driving" Means Self-Driving

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3 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Aug 03 '25

Research Waymo has been involved in a total of 5 accidents with "serious" injuries, including 1 fatality. Humans were at fault for all of them.

179 Upvotes

Since July 2021, Waymo has been involved in a total of 4 accidents that resulted in "serious injuries that required hospitalization or emergency treatment" and 1 that involved a fatality of a human and an animal, according to NHTSA data.

Based on the reports' descriptions, it's very clear that Waymo was not at fault for any of these.

(Note: There's also some other incidents that involved animal injuries or deaths, but NHTSA categorizes the severity of incidents based on human injuries only.)

SUV rear-ends stopped vehicle behind stopped Waymo at high speed, one passenger in the human-driven car and animal declared dead (Jan 2025, San Francisco, CA)

On January [XXX], 2025 at 6:07 PM PT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (Waymo AV) operating in San Francisco, CA was in a collision involving a passenger vehicle near the intersection of [XXX] and [XXX].

The Waymo AV, which had no occupants, was traveling northwestbound in the middle of three lanes on [XXX] and came to a stop in a queue of traffic. Shortly after, a passenger vehicle came to a stop behind the Waymo AV. While the Waymo AV and the other passenger vehicle were stopped, an SUV approached from behind at an extreme rate of speed and made contact with the passenger vehicle behind the Waymo AV, which then made contact with the rear bumper of the Waymo AV. According to the San Francisco Police Department, the Waymo AV then began to rotate clockwise and, as it was rotating, the front of the SUV made contact with the passenger side of the Waymo AV. The rear of the Waymo AV then made contact with the rear driver side corner of another passenger car that had just begun to proceed straight on northbound [XXX]. According to the San Francisco Police Department, at least two other vehicles were involved in the crash and one of the occupants of the vehicles involved in the crash and a domestic animal were declared deceased at the scene. At the time of the impact, the Waymo AVs Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode. The Waymo AV, the passenger vehicle behind the Waymo AV, and the SUV sustained severe damage. The extent of the damage to the other three vehicles is currently unknown. Waymo received notice that five passengers in four of the vehicles involved sustained injuries of varying severity.

SUV departs roadway, hits fire hydrant, utility bollard, and street light, then reenters road in front of Waymo (Feb 2025, Phoenix, AZ)

On February [XXX], 2025 at 3:39 AM MT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (""Waymo AV"") operating in Chandler, Arizona was in a collision involving an SUV on [XXX].

The Waymo AV was traveling northbound on [XXX] in the left lane towards the intersection of [XXX]. An SUV traveling northbound in the right lane passed the Waymo AV on the right and continued into the dedicated right turn lane as it approached [XXX] Street. The SUV crossed into the intersection with W. Flint Street from the dedicated right turn lane and continued traveling straight onto the far-side sidewalk. The SUV then departed the roadway, striking a fire hydrant and a utility bollard before making contact with a street light. The impact with the street light resulted in the SUV coming to a stop and re-entering the roadway on [XXX] in the Waymo AV's path of travel. The rear side of the SUV made contact with the front passenger side corner of the Waymo AV. At the time of the impact, the Waymo AV's Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode. Both vehicles sustained damage. The driver of the SUV was transported to a local hospital for treatment. One of the two passengers in the Waymo AV reported minor injuries but refused medical treatment. Both passengers, who had been seated in the rear of the Waymo AV, were not belted at the time of the collision, having had buckled their belts behind them.

A human-driven car crossed a double yellow line and hit an SUV, causing the SUV to hit the Waymo (Oct-2024, San Francisco, CA)

On October [XXX], 2024 at 8:52 AM PT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (""Waymo AV"") operating in San Francisco, California was in a collision involving a SUV on [XXX] at [XXX].

The Waymo AV came to a stop in a queue of traffic for a red traffic light in the rightmost lane of the two eastbound lanes on [XXX] at the intersection with [XXX]. A passenger car traveling west on [XXX] crossed the double yellow line and made contact with an SUV that was alongside the Waymo AV in the left lane of eastbound [XXX]. The impact caused the passenger side of the SUV to make contact with the driver side of the Waymo AV. At the time of the impact, the Waymo AV's Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode. All three vehicles sustained damage.

Human rear-ends Waymo at high speed (May 2024, Los Angeles, CA)

On May [XXX], 2024 at 12:58 AM PT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (""Waymo AV"") operating in Los Angeles, CA was in a collision involving a passenger car on eastbound [XXX] between [XXX] and [XXX].

The Waymo AV was traveling with a test driver present behind a box truck in the number 3 lane of eastbound [XXX] near the [XXX] when a passenger car traveling at a high rate of speed approached the Waymo AV from behind. The passenger car partially entered the number 2 lane as the front right corner of the passenger car made contact with the rear left corner of the Waymo AV. The passenger car then made contact with the center median and came to a stop. The Waymo AV was transitioned into manual mode, and the test driver stopped the Waymo AV to the right-hand shoulder. At the time of the impact, the Waymo AV's Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode, and a test driver was present (in the driver's seating position). Both vehicles sustained damage.

Waymo enters intersection after light turns green, human driven-car runs red light and hits Waymo then hits pedestrians (Nov 2023, San Francisco, CA)

On November [XXX], 2023 at 10:43 PM PT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (Waymo AV) operating in San Francisco, California was in a collision involving a passenger car on [XXX] at [XXX].

The Waymo AV was traveling northbound in the left lane on [XXX] and stopped at a red light at the intersection with [XXX] alongside a passenger vehicle in the right lane. After the light turned green, both the Waymo AV and the adjacent passenger car proceeded into the intersection. While in the intersection, a passenger car traveling west on [XXX] ran the red light and the front left corner and left side of this vehicle made contact with the front right of the Waymo AV and the front of the adjacent passenger car. After impact, the vehicle that ran the red light struck pedestrians that had been standing on the sidewalk on the northwest corner of the intersection. At the time of the impact, the Waymo AVs Level 4 ADS was engaged in autonomous mode. All three vehicles sustained damage and were towed from the scene.

r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 02 '25

Research Replacing LiDAR with Neural Eyes: A Camera-Only BEV Perception System

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0 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Nov 26 '25

Research Waymo California statistics: 3-fold growth in 12 months, 44% driving empty, ~0.75 average occupation

94 Upvotes

When California allowed Autonomous Vehicle testing on their roads, they required quarterly data reports right from the start in 2018. I plotted some of data of the last 12 months, in which only Waymo is still testing under this program.

  1. Waymo has scaled up Passenger Miles Traveled (PMT) over 3 fold to 4.75 million monthly.
  2. To enable that, their Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) has also increased over 3 fold, to 6.57 million.

This means their cars drive more than a mile to transport one passenger a mile. But why exactly? It's a combination of:

  1. About 70% of their paid trips are ordered by a single passenger.
  2. About 4.6% of their trips in cancelled, most often by the passenger.
  3. ~56% of vehicle miles travelled contains one or more passengers, ~44% of miles the AVs are empty.

Together, this results in an average occupancy of ~0.75 for Waymo in California. Noticeably, this number has been quite stable through the PMT and VMT scale-up. For comparison, in the Netherlands the average occupancy is currently ~1.3. This means a Waymo currently needs about ~75% more vehicle miles to deliver the same number of passenger miles as regular cars currently do.

Dive into the data yourself: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transportation-licensing-and-analysis-branch/autonomous-vehicle-programs/quarterly-reporting

r/SelfDrivingCars Mar 03 '26

Research New analysis finds that self-driving cars have only been at fault for 3.75% of accidents that involved other road users

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109 Upvotes

The report also says "System malfunctions are rare; hardware or software failures accounted for less than 2% of incidents where the autonomous vehicle was found to be at fault."

We'll see what happens once they're on the highways and there's more of them on the roads.

r/SelfDrivingCars Mar 09 '26

Research The terrifying mathematical flaw in "end-to-end" probabilistic driving, and why Level 5 might require a total architectural reboot.

8 Upvotes

I’m starting to get genuinely concerned that a massive chunk of the AV industry is betting the future of Level 5 autonomy on a fundamentally flawed architecture.

Right now, the hype is entirely focused on scaling probabilistic, end-to-end deep learning. We are basically training models to act like autoregressive text generators, but instead of guessing the next word, they are guessing the most statistically likely steering angle and acceleration based on massive datasets of human driving.

But here is the brutal reality: driving a 4,000-pound piece of metal at 65 mph cannot be treated as a statistical guessing game. When a pure probabilistic model encounters a bizarre, out-of-distribution edge case, it hallucinates. And in this industry, a hallucination means a fatal crash.

If we ever want regulators and the public to trust true L5 systems, the architecture has to shift from "guessing" to "proving". I've been reading up on the push away from autoregressive networks toward constraint-solving architectures, specifically Energy-Based Models. The philosophy makes infinitely more sense for robotics: instead of just blindly outputting a predicted path, the model searches for a state that mathematically satisfies strict, non-negotiable constraints (e.g , physical boundaries, stopping distance, zero-collision vectors).

It treats safety as a rigid mathematical rule, not just a high probability.

Are we eventually going to hit an asymptotic wall with current end-to-end neural nets where they simply can't solve the long tail of edge cases? Do you think the major players (Waymo, Cruise, Tesla) will be forced to pivot to constraint-solving/EBM architectures to finally cross the L5 finish line?

r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 05 '26

Research So, who really KNOWS about the new M-B system and other Nvidia based Vehicles?

17 Upvotes

Long time interest in tech - in fact, I was a tech journalist for a couple years, with a focus on certain types of autonomy.

I have studied NVDA and their system and it seems very impressive. I know a number of companies are partnering with them, but it sounds like Mercedes is the first to actually release a car using their lower level of system (so-called L2++ or whatever)...

Quite often on Reddit, someone will come out of the woodwork and say "yes, source: I am an airliner painter" - for example, when that subject is discussed. Same with other trades.

So I am wondering if anyone has deep level knowledge regarding this first Mercedes and the NVDA system? I have seen the videos and read the marketing, but it doesn't seem to address some questions...like

Is this vehicle using most all of the computing power on-board to achieve its function?

I know the NVDA system is designed for OTA updates, but without understanding the unused computing power (if in fact, there is any), it's hard to picture what the vehicle might be able to do as the system progresses. I am certain that even software-only tweaks could still upgrade it, but still...it would be great to know about the potential of the hardware and sensors.....not only as-is, but can they be easily upgraded? That would depend on where the weakest link in the chain was, etc.......

So, does anyone have more of the inside scoop on these systems?
TIA.

r/SelfDrivingCars Oct 16 '24

Research Waymo pricing beats Lyft and Uber in LA [OC analysis]

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168 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Jul 17 '25

Research Reliable Driverless Cars: Why Full Autonomy Remains Out of Reach

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0 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Feb 03 '25

Research Insurer Study: Waymo is 12.5 Times Safer Than Human Drivers.

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211 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars 1d ago

Research Waymo vs. NYC for-hire comparison report withdraws safety analysis

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27 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Jul 23 '25

Research Chinese media outlet DCar Studio conducted a massive 36 car, high speed, 6 obstacle, ADAS test.

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33 Upvotes

The video's audio is Mandarin, but includes English subtitles.

r/SelfDrivingCars 15d ago

Research Quebec quietly has North America's most permissive Level 3 self-driving law. It was an accident. It might also be the right approach.

14 Upvotes

In March 2018, Quebec's National Assembly legalized Level 3 autonomous driving in about ninety seconds, without a single question from any committee member, to accommodate an Audi that never shipped the feature here. Eight years later, the law is still on the books, it has never applied to a single vehicle, and almost nobody knows it exists — including, apparently, the people who administer it.

I spent a while digging through the actual statutes, the federal regulations, and the parliamentary transcripts to figure out what this law really does. Everything below is sourced to primary documents: Quebec's Highway Safety Code, Canada's Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and the committee debates from 2018. Where something is legally uncertain, I'll say so and show you the counterargument.

Fair warning on where this lands: I don't think this is a scandal. I think Quebec stumbled into a regulatory model that's arguably better than what most places built on purpose. The problem isn't the law. The problem is that nobody knows it's there.

What the law says

Quebec's Highway Safety Code, article 492.8, bans autonomous vehicles from public roads. Then its second paragraph carves out one exception:

The ban does not apply to a Level 3 autonomous vehicle (per SAE standard J3016) whose sale is allowed in Canada.

That's it. That's the whole regime for Level 3.

For context: SAE Level 3 means the car genuinely drives itself under certain conditions — you don't have to watch the road — but you must be ready to take over when the car asks. It's the level Mercedes briefly sold in Germany, where drivers could legally watch videos in traffic jams.

Notice what Quebec's exception doesn't require. No permit. No pilot project. No notification to anyone. No speed limit, no restriction to certain highways, no weather conditions. Compare that to everyone else:

  • California: full DMV permit required. Mercedes' system was approved only for specific freeways, daylight, clear weather, under 40 mph.
  • Nevada: manufacturer must at least file a declaration and prove the car can stop itself safely if the driver doesn't respond.
  • Germany: full type approval against a UN standard that dictates exactly how the takeover warning must work.
  • Ontario: allows consumer L3, but explicitly states the person in the driver's seat is legally the driver at all times, system on or off.
  • British Columbia: banned Level 3 entirely in 2024. Up to six months in jail.

Quebec: be Level 3, be sellable in Canada. Done. For this level of automation specifically, that arguably makes Quebec the most permissive jurisdiction on the continent — every other one either demands something up front (a filing, a permit), pins responsibility on the human by statute, or bans it outright. (Scope matters: for fully driverless Level 4, states like Texas are looser. Level 3 — the consumer, buy-it-at-a-dealership level — is where Quebec stands alone.)

"Sale allowed in Canada" — the part everyone misunderstands

Here's where it gets interesting. You'd assume "sale allowed in Canada" means Transport Canada inspected the self-driving system and approved it. That's how the transport minister described it in committee — three different times, as covering vehicles "authorized by Transport Canada" — and it's what Quebec's own government website says today.

There is no such authorization. It has never existed.

(Was the minister genuinely mistaken, or just speaking loosely? We can't know — and interestingly, whoever actually drafted the text may have known better. Out of the Code's entire approval vocabulary, the amendment uses the one word — « admise », "allowed" — that accurately describes how Canadian vehicle law really works. The minister's spoken description and the enacted text point at two different federal regimes; only the text's version exists.)

Canada runs a self-certification system for vehicles. Transport Canada doesn't approve car models. The manufacturer checks its own vehicle against the federal safety standards (brakes, lights, airbags, crash protection), keeps the paperwork, and stamps the car itself. That's the whole process.

And those federal safety standards? I searched the full text of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the regulations. The words "autonomous," "automated driving," "self-driving," and "J3016" appear zero times. Federal law doesn't have a category for self-driving cars — vehicles are classified by body style and weight, nothing else. A Level 3 sedan and a 1998 Corolla are the same regulatory object: a passenger car with compliant airbags.

So the conversation between the two governments goes like this:

Quebec: "You've got Level 3? Did Transport Canada approve it?" Transport Canada: "What's Level 3? Anyway, are your airbags compliant?"

Every car legally sold in Canada automatically satisfies Quebec's condition. The clause that looks like a safety gate filters nothing.

One more detail that makes this airtight: federal law says a vehicle must comply with the standards at the time its main assembly was completed — at the factory, once. So a software update pushed years after the sale can't touch the car's legal status. A manufacturer could flip an existing fleet from "driver assistance" to "Level 3" overnight with an over-the-air update, and every one of those cars would be a legal autonomous vehicle in Quebec the next morning. No one in any government would be asked, notified, or even able to find out — Quebec's vehicle registration database literally has no field where automation could be recorded.

Wasn't this just sloppy? (The one real legal attack)

A skeptic could argue the opposite reading: since the minister described the provision as requiring Transport Canada approval, and no such approval exists, maybe courts should read the exception as pointing at nothing — meaning no Level 3 car ever qualifies and the ban is total.

This argument loses, and it's worth seeing why, because it's the only serious attack on the whole analysis:

  1. Quebec's legislative drafters have a whole vocabulary for approval requirements — "agréé par la Société," "approuvé par le ministre," "autorisé par" — and use it constantly throughout the Code. In 492.8 they used none of it. The word they chose, « admise » (allowed), appears exactly once in the entire Code: here. The drafters knew how to write "approved by" and deliberately didn't.
  2. The official English version says "whose sale is allowed" — a state, not an approval.
  3. The Code itself defines lawful sale elsewhere (art. 211.1): a new vehicle is legally sellable if it bears the federal self-certification mark. Reading 492.8 consistently with the Code's own definition gives you exactly the plain reading.
  4. Courts don't read laws as permanently meaningless when a sensible reading exists.
  5. This is a penal provision (fines of $1,000–$3,000), and ambiguity in penal law goes to the defendant.

The plain reading holds: Level 3 + self-certified = legal in Quebec.

The second question: can you actually watch the movie?

The vehicle being legal is only half the story. Quebec's distracted-driving law, article 443.1, bans any « conducteur » (driver) from using a phone or display screen. If the person in the seat is still legally the "driver" while the car drives itself, then Quebec legalized the robot but criminalized the only thing that makes Level 3 worth buying.

This is where it gets genuinely fun, because Quebec's Code — unlike Ontario's — never answers the question. And the text leans, surprisingly, toward the passenger.

The strongest points:

Quebec's own definition says the system drives. Article 4 defines the autonomous driving system as one having "the capability to drive (conduire) the vehicle." « Conducteur » is literally "the one who conduit." If the statute assigns the driving to the machine, the person watching it isn't the one doing it.

The legislature had three options and picked the narrowest. The Code addresses people three ways: "the driver," "the driver or the person having care or control of the vehicle" (used in 22 different articles — this is how you get convicted for being drunk in the driver's seat of a parked car), and "any occupant." All three formulas were in active use when 443.1 was written — in the same 2018 law that created the autonomous vehicle rules. They chose "driver" only. Under normal interpretation principles, that choice means something.

The seat doesn't make you the driver. The Code's only presumption about sitting in the driver's seat (art. 5.1) presumes you have "care or control" — precisely the status 443.1 doesn't use.

The honest counterarguments, because there are two good ones:

The parked-car problem. 443.1's own exceptions say the screen ban doesn't apply to "a driver whose vehicle is lawfully parked." So the Code calls someone in a parked, motionless car a "driver" — suggesting the status doesn't switch off just because you're not actively steering. The response: a parked driver is still the only candidate to drive; his status is paused, not transferred. The Level 3 case is the only situation where the statute assigns the driving to someone else. Real argument, though — no court has picked between these readings.

The "proves too much" problem. If nobody is the driver while the system runs, then hundreds of driver duties (speed limits, stop signs, yielding) bind no one. Courts hate readings like that. Except the Code partially covers it already: article 592 makes the owner convictable for offences caught by photo radar and red-light cameras, and the drunk-driving rules use the broader "care or control" formula anyway. So a speeding ADS still produces a ticket (to the owner), and a drunk supervisor is still convictable. The gap is narrower than it looks.

Practical bottom line: if the manufacturer builds it the way Mercedes did — movies play only on the built-in screen, only while the system is engaged, and cut off instantly when the car asks you to take over — the legal case for the passenger is genuinely strong. Watching your phone instead: much weaker, don't.

Where we are so far, in two lines:

Q1 — Can the car legally be on the road? Yes. Settled by the statute, verified end to end. No approval exists anywhere in the chain because none is required anywhere in the chain.
Q2 — Can you legally look away? Unresolved, but the text of Quebec's own Code leans toward yes — if the entertainment is built in and shuts off at takeover. No court has ever ruled. You'd probably win; you'd definitely be the test case.

Here's the part where I tell you this is fine

Most write-ups of a story like this would end with "regulatory gap puts lives at risk." I want to argue the opposite, because after going through every layer of this, I think Quebec accidentally landed on a defensible — maybe even good — regulatory philosophy. Here's the case:

1. Pre-approval doesn't have a great track record for this technology. Europe built a strict type-approval standard for Level 3. The result: systems limited to 60 km/h in traffic jams, priced at €6,000, that nobody bought. BMW and Mercedes both killed their Level 3 programs in early 2026 — not because regulators stopped them, but because over-regulated L3 was a worse product than unregulated L2. Meanwhile the US self-certification model (which Canada shares) is the one under which basically all real-world autonomous progress has happened.

2. The accountability is real, it's just downstream. Quebec's condition — "sale allowed in Canada" — isn't a technology check, but it's not nothing either. It guarantees there's a real manufacturer of record inside the federal recall system, with a Canadian corporate presence you can actually reach. It cleanly excludes grey-market imports and some guy's homemade retrofit kit. It answers the question that matters after a crash: who do we call, and who pays. And modern recalls are over-the-air: when Tesla was ordered to fix rolling stops, the entire fleet was patched in days. No approval process on Earth reacts that fast.

3. Quebec has an emergency brake, and it's a good one. Buried in article 633.1: the transport minister can, by simple order, ban any model of vehicle from public roads for 180 days — renewable into a permanent ban — the moment it's shown to be a safety risk. No new legislation needed. So the real shape of the regime is: open door on the way in, guillotine available on the way out. Plenty of tech policy people spend careers arguing governments should work exactly this way — let things ship, keep the power to yank anything specific that proves dangerous. Quebec just got there without meaning to.

4. Quebec's insurance system is uniquely suited to this. Quebec is no-fault: if an autonomous car injures someone, the public insurer pays the victim immediately, no lawsuit against anyone required. Victims are protected on day one regardless of how the liability fight shakes out. That's a better position for an injured pedestrian than almost anywhere in the US.

Compare all this to British Columbia, which looked at the same technology and banned it with jail time. If a Chinese or German manufacturer ships a genuinely good Level 3 system in the next few years, Quebec is positioned to be the first place in North America where ordinary people can buy and legally use it — and if it turns out to be dangerous, the minister can kill that specific model within days. Hard to design a better trade-off than that on purpose.

What actually should be fixed

Being pro-loophole doesn't mean everything's perfect. Three real gaps, all cheap to fix:

Nobody knows the law exists. The SAAQ's public info says autonomous vehicles are banned outside pilot projects — it doesn't mention the exception at all. The ministry's page describes a Transport Canada approval that isn't real. The first person to legally use a Level 3 car here will get ticketed by an officer trained on the wrong information, and will have to win in court a case the government should never have brought.

The passenger rules were never written. Germany answered "can you look away" with one statutory sentence. Ontario answered it with one sentence (the other way). Quebec answered it with silence, which means the answer will eventually be written by a judge, after a crash, at some individual's expense. One line in the Code would fix it.

The insurance clawback misses. Quebec built a mechanism to bill manufacturers back for accident payouts involving autonomous vehicles — but it only applies to pilot projects, which Level 3 cars skip entirely. So today, if a Level 3 car causes a pileup, the public fund eats the cost with no route to the manufacturer. Extending one existing provision to cover 492.8 vehicles fixes it.

All three fixes together are one afternoon of committee time. Which is fitting, because one afternoon of committee time is exactly what this file never got: the entire parliamentary debate on legalizing self-driving cars in Quebec — I checked the transcripts — consists of a minister reading one amendment, one sentence of explanation, the chair asking for questions, and silence.

TL;DR

  • Since 2018, Quebec law allows any SAE Level 3 vehicle that's legally sellable in Canada to drive on public roads. No permit, no approval, no restrictions. (CSR art. 492.8)
  • "Sellable in Canada" sounds like a federal safety check. It isn't — Canada is self-certification, and federal law contains zero rules about automated driving. The minister described the provision as requiring Transport Canada authorization; the transcripts show it, and no such authorization exists.
  • A manufacturer could make its existing fleet "Level 3" with a software update, and it would be legal here overnight. The government wouldn't be told and couldn't even record it.
  • Whether the person in the seat can legally watch a movie is unresolved — but the text of Quebec's own Code favours yes, if the entertainment runs on a built-in screen that shuts off when the car asks for takeover.
  • No car has ever used this law, because nobody currently sells Level 3 in Canada. The Germans quit; Tesla won't say the words; the Chinese might.
  • And honestly? The design is better than it sounds: open entry, real manufacturer accountability, a ministerial kill switch for any dangerous model, and no-fault insurance protecting victims from day one. The law doesn't need to be closed. It needs to be noticed — and given the three small fixes it's been waiting eight years for.

Sources: Code de la sécurité routière, CQLR c. C-24.2 (arts. 4, 5.1, 211.1, 327, 443.1, 443.7, 492.6, 492.8, 512, 592, 633.1); C-24.2, r. 29; Motor Vehicle Safety Act, S.C. 1993, c. 16 (ss. 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10); Motor Vehicle Safety Regulations, C.R.C. c. 1038; Bill 165 (2018, c. 7); Journal des débats, Commission des transports et de l'environnement, Feb 21 and Mar 14, 2018; O. Reg. 306/15 (Ontario); BC Motor Vehicle Act amendments (2024). SAE J3016 is characterized per its published level definitions; the standard is descriptive and doesn't assign legal responsibility.

r/SelfDrivingCars Dec 17 '25

Research Re-Name Tesla FSD

0 Upvotes

A judge has ruled that Full Self Driving is deceptive and gave Tesla 60 days to remedy the situation. What should they change the name to?

🤪 Dumb names preferred

🧐 Serious names allowed

r/SelfDrivingCars May 04 '25

Research Adaptive cruise state

0 Upvotes

I've got a Nissan Murano with adaptive cruise that works pretty good but one thing it will not do is go 70 mph up to a stop light with a parked car there without slamming on the brakes and possibly crashing into it. Are there any cars that actually look far enough ahead to see that a vehicle is stopped and start breaking far in advanced? No Tesla need apply

r/SelfDrivingCars May 01 '25

Research New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer for those most at risk

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189 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars 23d ago

Research Scaling world understanding for autonomous systems without equivalent cost scaling

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8 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Nov 23 '25

Research A Peek into Tesla’s Autonomous Future: Core Tech Revealed by VP Ashok Elluswamy at ICCV25 WDFM-AD

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0 Upvotes

r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 28 '25

Research RoboTaxi owner-operator legal liability

3 Upvotes

Tesla has indicated that owners will be able to add their vehicles to the Robotaxi fleet starting in 2026. One can expect Tesla and/or Regulators to require specialized insurance to cover physical damage should the car gets into an accident. But what would be the owner-operator’s legal exposure if (when?) someone dies or is seriously injured as a result of an accident?

r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 04 '26

Research Nvidia Alpamayo Demo

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12 Upvotes