New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — a mandate Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi can’t meet. The proposed law, S1677, would effectively lock Tesla out of the most densely populated US state unless it adds the radar and lidar hardware that Elon Musk has spent years insisting his cars don’t need. What the bill actually requires State Senator Andrew Zwicker, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, sponsored the bill after riding in a Waymo in Phoenix. He says the legislation is about safety, not any single company. “This is not anti-Tesla. I’m pro-New Jersey safety,” Zwicker told The Verge. The bill sets up a three-year pilot program with hard requirements. Operators must equip fully driverless vehicles with cameras plus two other sensing technologies — in practice, radar and lidar. They must also complete at least 50,000 miles of supervised testing with a human safety driver in the state before removing the driver, report every crash to the state, and get official authorization before launching any commercial driverless network. The framework mirrors recommendations from SAVE-US, a nonprofit pushing for tighter oversight of autonomous vehicles. There’s a second problem for Tesla buried in the details. The bill favors keeping traditional controls like a steering wheel and pedals, which would exclude the Tesla Cybercab — a vehicle Tesla is already mass-producing with no steering wheel or pedals at all. And neighboring New York is considering a nearly identical hardware mandate. The sensor fight Tesla keeps losing on the data The whole bill comes down to how a car sees the road. Waymo, Zoox, and nearly every other serious operator run cameras, radar, and lidar together, building overlapping layers of data so that when one sensor fails, another covers