New York drops plan for unsupervised robotaxis
Hochul budget retreat keeps hands-on-wheel rule, L4 autonomy remains a permissioned product
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul has quietly done what years of glossy demos and venture capital could not: she reminded the robotaxi industry that “autonomy” is still a legislative feature flag.
According to Business Insider, Hochul has dropped a budget proposal that would have created a framework for commercial operation of fully driverless robotaxis outside New York City, subject to local government approval. The withdrawal came after the proposal failed to gain traction in the state legislature. New York City was never guaranteed anyway: the plan would have left ultimate authority over NYC deployments to the mayor and city council.
The immediate casualty is Waymo’s long-running New York ambition. Waymo currently tests in NYC with human safety drivers under a permit approved during former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration; that permit expires March 31, and it is unclear whether the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will renew it, Business Insider reports. Meanwhile, New York State law still requires a human safety driver with hands on the wheel—an unusually explicit statutory denial of what Level 4 autonomy is supposed to mean.
Technically, New York is not an arbitrary “hard mode” map. A driverless service in the state would have to survive winter weather, road salt, grime, intermittent lane markings, aggressive double-parking, dense pedestrian flows, and complex intersections—then add tunnels and GPS-degraded urban canyons if NYC ever opens. The operational burden is not just perception and planning; it’s also fleet uptime, remote assistance, incident response, and a compliance regime that can demand explainability on cue.
But the more revealing constraint is political economy. Waymo has been lobbying Hochul’s office and lawmakers for months, per state records cited by Business Insider, and other autonomous-vehicle firms have tried and failed to gain a foothold: Cruise shelved Manhattan testing plans in 2017 before imploding; Mobileye and others have run limited pilots. When one jurisdiction can veto your business model, product strategy shifts from “make it work” to “make it legible to regulators.”
The industry’s timing makes the setback sting. Waymo said this week it raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation to expand into more than 20 cities. New York just demonstrated that the limiting reagent isn’t capital, sensors, or even software—it’s a handful of legislators who can decide that a human must keep their hands on the wheel forever.
If robotaxis eventually arrive, they may do so less as an engineering triumph than as a negotiated settlement: autonomy by permission slip, geofenced not by physics but by politics.