On Sunday morning, September 20, 2026, a Waymo driverless taxi drove through barricades and a stop sign and rolled straight into the South Pearl Street Farmers Market in Denver — while vendors were setting out tomatoes. Market workers stopped the car manually. The news itself was amusing, but it had a nastier hook: a Denver police spokesperson confirmed that in Colorado there's simply no one to ticket — the state's citation mechanism is tied to a human driver, and there is no driver.
This struck me not as an anecdote but as a symptom. Century-old law was built around the figure of a human behind the wheel: "violator" legally meant "the person who pressed the wrong pedal." For the first time in traffic law history, robotaxis have created a situation where a violation is documented, victims exist, cameras captured everything — but the subject of the violation does not exist. I wanted to understand where this gap came from, how different states are closing it, and what in legal tradition has ever been "punished without a human."
A year ago, San Bruno police in California stopped a Waymo for an illegal U-turn and honestly wrote on Facebook: "our citation books don't have a box for 'robot.'" Since then the picture has fragmented sharply: Arizona and Florida have long been fining the company as the "driver," California only closed the gap on July 1, 2026 with its own administrative procedure, and Colorado is still searching for a solution. Behind the everyday anecdote about the farmers market hides a restructuring of the very concept of road responsibility — and it's happening in the details of police instructions and DMV forms, the last place legislators look.
The San Bruno incident, in a San Francisco suburb, is worth retelling in detail because it became both a meme and a precedent for the absence of precedent. Early Saturday morning, September 27, 2025, officers were conducting a DUI operation when a Waymo made an illegal U-turn right in front of them — directly at an intersection, at a "no U-turn" sign. The car stopped on its own, unlocked its doors, lowered its windows. An officer looked into the empty driver's seat — the photo made its way around social media. They didn't issue a citation: the official citation book simply had no field for such a case.
Police reported the "glitch" to Waymo and expressed hope that reprogramming would teach the car not to make illegal U-turns. The post collected over five hundred comments, most outraged: how is it the company wasn't fined?
The situation repeated a year later in Denver, but with more absurd scenery. Waymo launched in the city on September 1, 2026, and by the morning of the 20th its car "took a corner too fast," ran a stop sign and barricades, and ended up on the farmers market grounds where vendors were preparing for trading. Market workers manually escorted the boxy vehicle off the roadway. And again: no sanctions, because "if there's no driver, there's currently no mechanism in state law to issue a citation" — official Denver police wording.
Yet the same Waymo in other states pays tickets without issue. "We receive citations and pay them like any other driver," said company spokesperson Chris Bonelli. Robotaxis don't have innate immunity — there's a Frankensteinian patchwork of American law: fifty states, fifty answers to one question.
States that encountered self-driving cars earliest chose three different architectures of responsibility.
Arizona solved the question at the statute level — ARS 28-9702: the operator (read: company) is designated responsible for the vehicle and all its violations. The company must file a Law Enforcement Interaction Plan before hitting the roads. During a stop, the officer contacts a live representative through speakers built into the car; if necessary, police can order the remote operator to move the car or open the door themselves and manually roll it to safety. The citation is issued to the company, the company pays and has the right to appeal. Tempe Police Detective Jonathan Seal put it with bureaucratic directness: "when they commit a violation, the company is, so to speak, the 'driver' of the vehicle."
Florida went even more radical: under local law, the autonomous driving system is legally considered the sole operator of the car, and the fine also goes to the company. Formally this is closest to what activists ask for — recognition that a "driver" doesn't have to be human.
California — Waymo's birthplace and the main robotaxi market — until recently was a legal desert. Highway Patrol Lieutenant Matt Gutierrez explained back in February 2026: you can't issue a moving violation to a driverless car because "there has to be somebody that you can hold a duty of care to." Since July 1, 2026, the state closed the gap without resorting to a classic ticket: a separate administrative procedure appeared — Notice of Autonomous Vehicle Noncompliance, form OL 325. An officer who witnesses a violation fills it out and within 72 hours submits it to DMV and the manufacturer; for dangerous behavior — priority review within 24 hours.
Then DMV investigates the incident and, if the problem repeats, can restrict or revoke the company's operational permit. No points, no fines in the usual sense — just one lever, but right at the throat: the right to operate at all.
Colorado remained in a fourth category: a 2017 law (SB 17-213) permitted self-driving cars "provided all laws are followed," but was written in an era when it was assumed a human behind the wheel was always ready to take control. It didn't describe full driverless mode at all — hence the alarming bulletin for officers that Denver police circulated back in July 2026, a month before Waymo's city launch.
The Denver police bulletin, obtained by local outlet BusinessDen, is a fascinating document in itself: it's an instruction manual for dealing with an invisible driver. The car stops on its own when it sees lights and remains stationary until contact ends, unlocks doors and lowers windows so Waymo's remote representative can speak with the officer. Communication — via QR codes on windows or a button on the center console. Copies of registration, insurance, and owner data are in the sun visors.
Then the genre specifics begin. In an accident, officers are told to leave the "driver" field in the report blank — there's a separate box for self-driving. Extinguishing a Waymo fire is prohibited unless it's to save a life: battery fires emit toxic fumes. Cabin video recordings are deleted after 24 hours, and accessing them requires a search warrant. Collectively, police are being trained to treat the vehicle as a suspicious technological object: neutralize first, then document.
The most interesting discovery from this digging: the idea of "punishing a thing" is archaic. Law buried it a century and a half ago, and now is involuntarily resurrecting it.
In medieval England there existed the institution of deodand: an object that caused a person's death was "given to God" — confiscated by the crown as atonement. A cart that ran over a peasant, a bell that fell on people, later — a locomotive. The institution lived for centuries and was formally abolished only in 1846, and the main reason was precisely railroads: accidents became so numerous that confiscating locomotives became absurd. Parliamentary debates at the time — exactly ours today: if an object causes harm systematically, punishing the object itself is ridiculous, you have to hold accountable whoever profits from it.
American law, however, still punishes things — through the mechanism of in rem forfeiture, a lawsuit against the object itself. In U.S. court registries lives a case titled "United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins" (2008, Ninth Circuit): the government confiscated a cargo of fins obtained in violation of law. The defendant — not a person, but cargo. Traffic cameras at intersections — the same logic in soft form: the violation is recorded automatically, and the person is later required to identify themselves as the driver. California Supreme Court in People v. Gray (2014) examined, incidentally, not "who was driving" but procedural minutiae like 30-day notice of a new camera — that is, the infrastructure of automated enforcement in which the human violator is identified after the fact by photo.
Robotaxis turn this construction inside out: before, automation was a way to find a person after a violation, now it makes the person himself unnecessary. Law responds by selecting boxes in forms, and the empty "driver" field in Denver's police report is possibly the most honest legal document of the era.
Fines are the tip of the iceberg; real stakes are below the waterline, and they're far more serious. Waymo alone in 2025 completed over 14 million rides — triple the year before — and by the end of 2026 is targeting a million rides per week; geography grew from 10 to 15 cities, including Las Vegas. At that scale even a microscopic violation rate yields thousands of incidents per year.
And violations aren't all amusing. In Austin, robotaxis illegally passed stopped school buses at least 19 times during the school year; Waymo in December 2025 recalled 3,000 cars for a software update, but the school district documented continuing incidents and asked for operations near schools to be suspended — the company refused. In January 2026, a Waymo struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica (the child ran out from behind a parked SUV; the car reduced speed from 17 to under 6 mph, injuries were minor) — NHTSA and NTSB opened investigations, and the Senate summoned company leadership for hearings.
Against this backdrop it's noticeable: behind form OL 325 stands a requirement for a report, not money. The manufacturer must explain incident factors, attach video and coordinates, name the software version, describe measures and remediation. The regulator here strikes with transparency — for a company whose entire value sits in software, forced disclosure of every failure hurts more than a fine.
Curiously, Europe is wading into the same river cautiously: London's first commercial robotaxi service (Wayve through Uber, September 2026) includes just 15 cars, and each has a licensed driver sitting in it who can be saddled with both fines and liability. The legal gap of "no one to ticket" hasn't opened in Britain precisely because a human in the seat remains a legal cushion.
The entire story with the empty box for robot comes down to a fundamental assumption that traffic law has carried from the beginning: behind every violation stands a person who can be punished and thereby retrained — by fine, by points, by license suspension. This assumption had an educational function: a ticket teaches the violator.
With a manufacturer-company this logic works differently. You can't "retrain" it with a $200 citation; you can only force it to fix the software, restrict territory, or shut down the business. That's why all three mature legal strategies — "company is driver" (Arizona), "system is operator" (Florida), "administrative permit instead of ticket" (California) — are attempts to stuff a corporation into an old box called "driver," though the box doesn't fit. No one has written genuinely new law yet: we're making robotaxis wear human clothes instead of sewing their own.
And here deodand returns from an unexpected angle. Medieval law punished things for a simple reason: it had no concept of corporate responsibility, and if the bell was guilty, only the bell could be punished. Modern law faced a mirror situation: the subject of violation exists (the corporation), but punishment designed for people doesn't apply to it. The "robot" box in police books is a stunted sprout of the next legal era: responsibility of systems, not people. In 1846 Parliament abolished deodands because punishing locomotives became absurd; it seems in the 2020s we're reinventing them for automobiles, only now with monthly DMV reporting.
An open question remains, one that none of the sources found answers: what happens when the first such "violation" leads to serious consequences and insurers and prosecutors start arguing who's "guilty" — the specific software version, the operator who let it drive, or the city that opened the road. Form OL 325 requires listing the software version — a good start, but that's a diagnostic card, not a verdict. The legal apparatus for distributing blame between lines of code hasn't been built yet. Meanwhile the most accurate description of the situation belongs to San Bruno police: "no driver, no hands, no clue."