New Jersey Proposes Law Requiring Autonomous Commercial Vehicles to Use at Least Three Sensor Types, Banning Vision-Only Systems

New Jersey is advancing Senate Bill S1677, which mandates that autonomous commercial vehicles be equipped with cameras and at least two other types of sensors—such as radar and lidar. This requirement effectively excludes Tesla’s vision-only autonomous driving approach, which relies solely on cameras, while companies using multi-sensor fusion systems, like Waymo, would comply with the regulation. The bill was introduced by State Senator Andrew Zwicker, who stated its goal is to enhance road safety and emphasized it is not targeted at any specific company. The legislation establishes a three-year pilot program requiring participating companies to complete at least 50,000 miles of supervised testing within New Jersey, using vehicles outfitted with cameras plus two additional sensing technologies. All incidents must be reported to the state government, and official approval is required before launching commercial driverless services. The bill also favors retaining traditional manual controls such as steering wheels and pedals—contradicting Tesla’s planned Cybercab design, which features no steering wheel or pedals. Currently, most leading autonomous vehicle companies employ perception systems combining cameras, radar, and lidar, whereas Tesla maintains its vision-only strategy, arguing that additional sensors reduce system reliability and increase costs. Public data indicates that vision-only systems underperform compared to lidar-equipped solutions in certain scenarios. To date, Waymo has deployed over 3,500 autonomous vehicles across 11 metropolitan areas in the U.S., while Tesla has yet to conduct large-scale unsupervised public road testing. New York State is also considering similar mandatory hardware requirements.