Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series from TechUnited:NJ on autonomous vehicles in New Jersey. This piece looks at the economic opportunity; Part 2 covers safety and Part 3 covers mobility.
If your summer travel took you through San Francisco, Miami, Phoenix or Austin, you may have felt as though you’d been dropped into the future. In each of those cities, you can now hail a driverless car the same way you’d order an Uber here in New Jersey. The technology has been in the works for more than 15 years, and it’s no longer an experiment. These are real, operating services, now live across six states and a growing list of cities, giving more than 500,000 paid rides a week.
In just a few weeks, it will be New Jersey’s turn to decide whether we allow these cars on our roads at all. It’s a rare chance for us to lead on the adoption of a breakthrough technology, but that decision is buried in a bill that risks missing the forest for the trees.
At TechUnited:NJ, we believe the stakes are bigger than any single bill. The bill gets one big thing right: it proposes a pilot, which is how this technology has been successfully deployed in other states. However, it’s written from an instinct to fence autonomous vehicles in from the start, rather than to invite serious operators in and hold them to a high standard. The opportunity New Jersey has in front of us is to lead on a technology that’s already safer than human drivers — 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human drivers, per a Swiss Re study of more than 25 million fully autonomous Waymo miles — and could ease some of the worst traffic in the country. Instead, we’re debating ways to limit that opportunity before it gets off the ground.
New Jersey used to be where the future got invented. The light bulb and the phonograph came out of Edison’s lab in Menlo Park. The transistor, the technology inside every device you own, was born at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, and so was the first practical solar cell. The first antibiotic to beat tuberculosis was discovered in a lab at Rutgers. For a stretch of the last century, no place on earth turned ideas into industries faster than we did.
Then we lost the thread. Somewhere along the way we became known less for our innovation and more so as an exporter of top talent. We became the state that raised brilliant people and then watched them build careers in New York, Boston or California.
That trend is finally changing. New Jersey recently aligned with the federal QSBS exclusion, giving founders and early investors a real tax reason to start companies here. The state’s angel investor tax credit rewards backing startups at the riskiest moment to invest. We’ve leaned into artificial intelligence, life sciences and clean energy.
Piece by piece, we’ve been learning to not just grow but also retain and attract top technical talent and startups. Autonomous vehicles are the next test of whether we mean it, because the bill in front of us stands to hamstring the technology from the start.
Autonomous vehicles are not just good for New Jersey’s tech industry, but for our entire economy. A service that operates here brings real economic activity with it: operations and safety jobs, depots and fleet maintenance, mapping and data work, the local hiring and spending that follow and the partnerships a company builds when it actually does business in New Jersey. Being an early, willing market is how we keep that activity and earn a real voice in setting the standards and steering the next wave of investment. It’s the kind of economic activity we’ve spent years trying to attract, and it doesn’t show up in states that hang a closed sign on the door.
As the bill is currently written, we’re set up to send exactly the opposite message. It would keep a human behind the wheel for years longer than the safety data requires and confine driverless taxis to a short list of designated highways, which is not how most New Jerseyans actually get around. We’ll get into why those rules misread the technology in the next two pieces. But you don’t need the technical case to see the problem. To a company deciding where to build, provisions like these are the tell. They tell the operators we’re trying to attract to the state that New Jersey wants the prestige of innovation without the substance to back it up.
Other states are not waiting. Texas voted nearly a decade ago, in 2017, that autonomous vehicles could operate without a driver behind the wheel. Arizona opened its roads even earlier and became the first place in the world you could hail a driverless car. Even our neighbor, Pennsylvania, voted to make driverless car deployment legal in 2022. Texas is now home to Waymo, Tesla and Zoox — and Arizona drew the cluster that made Phoenix the industry’s first commercial hub. The capital followed: more than $23 billion into the sector this year alone. New Jersey’s bill, as written, would do the opposite. Waiting to adopt won’t spare us the technology; we’ll simply inherit it later, after the economic growth has gone elsewhere.
None of this means we should throw the doors open with no rules, and we don’t need to risk public safety for economic development. The smart move is the one other states have already made: a pilot that invites serious operators to build here while demanding real accountability in return, with rigorous public safety reporting, clear standards and consequences when an operator falls short. That is how we attract the best companies and protect the public at the same time. Rules built on evidence tell the country New Jersey is open for the businesses we say we want.
At TechUnited:NJ, our mission is to empower the innovators, disruptors and entrepreneurs building what comes next. Autonomous vehicles are what’s next, and we have the opportunity to decide how we want to usher that technology into the state. We can be a state where this industry operates, invests and hires. Or we can be one that regulates so pilots never get off the ground. An evidence-based pilot design is how New Jersey keeps a hand in what comes next instead of watching it grow across state lines. Let us decide to be in it.
MJ Durkin is the chief operating officer of TechUnited:NJ.
