Can you be arrested for driving an autonomous vehicle while drunk? Short answer is Yes.
SAE International, a standards-setting association, has grouped modern vehicles into different levels of automation. Most cars on the road today are Level 0 vehicles, which can provide warnings or safety interventions while driving, or Level 1 vehicles, which assist with either acceleration and braking or steering (but not both). Level 2 vehicles, including Teslas, assist with acceleration and braking and steering, though they still require human supervision at all times; many vehicles can, in turn, monitor the human, tracking the position of the eyes, head, and hands of the driver. (In FSD mode, the pedals don’t move but the wheel turns serenely; one adjusts to the sensation quickly.) Then there’s the Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, the only Level 3 operating system available to consumers. Such vehicles can drive autonomously, but only at certain speeds and in certain conditions, and the driver must be available to take the wheel when necessary. In short, unless you’re in a Waymo or another driverless Level 4 vehicle, the law expects you to be sober.
But my voyage with the wellness entrepreneur suggested that, perhaps, more semiautonomous vehicle owners drive under the influence than I, the owner of a Level 0 vehicle (make: Kia, model: idiot) previously assumed.
So I asked the people who deal with impaired drivers for a living. Lieutenant William White of the Austin Police Department said its DWI specialists have not observed that drivers of Level 2 vehicles, which began tooling around in 2013, are more likely to drive impaired than drivers of Level 0 and 1 vehicles. Still, he agreed: “I’m not doubting that people will probably do it. People will drive drunk even when they don’t have self-driving mode, so there’s no reason that a person wouldn’t then try to take advantage of it.”
I asked White whether drunk driving a Tesla, in self-driving mode, is any safer than, say, my Kia. “I would argue no,” White answered, gamely. He then questioned whether driver-assistance features might cause impaired drivers to become even less alert—less able to react to unexpected situations on the road or even errors by their vehicles. “If you’re drunk, which is already a factor, and you’re also really not paying attention because you’re relying on the car, to me that’s just as dangerous as a drunk who’s actually paying attention and operating the car.” In April, a 37-year-old Florida woman with a blood-alcohol content more than twice the legal limit was arrested after her Tesla, which had been in self-driving mode, stopped in the middle of the interstate. The woman had fallen asleep in it; after she did not respond to the warnings issued by the vehicle when it detected her inattention, the car stopped.
White also noted that even if autopilot flawlessly disguises impaired driving, a driver under the influence can get pulled over for many reasons besides moving erratically or causing an accident. “If he gets stopped for whatever reason—if someone hits his car, for example—and then the officer starts talking to him and realizes he’s drunk, he’s still going to be arrested for a DUI,” White said. And no car is perfect. “Being in a self-driving mode is not a guarantee that it doesn’t commit traffic violations, because the autonomous vehicles do quite often commit traffic violations.” He pointed to an incident earlier this year when, after a mass shooting at an Austin bar, a Waymo—which, as a Level 4 vehicle, should know better—froze in the middle of the road, blocking a responding ambulance. And White expressed his bafflement over Tesla’s “Mad Max” mode, a feature of FSD that allows the car to drive over the speed limit and make more aggressive maneuvers. “You could be pulled over just for speeding, and you could say, ‘Well, I had it in autonomous mode.’ Too bad. Now we’ve stopped you. We can tell you’ve been drinking, and you’re operating the vehicle, so it’s irrelevant that it’s self-driving.”
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Now, as cars have become more complex, with tools such as FSD, as well as subtler automated features, questions of when and whether someone is “operating” a car have gotten far more complex too. Some distinctions are clearer than others: It is legal for a Waymo to shepherd you around when you’re drunk, but it’s a DWI for a Tesla to do so. But if you use Tesla’s “Actually Smart Summon” function, in which your car self-drives a very short distance to meet you—from across a bar parking lot, for instance—so that your sober friend can take the wheel, have you technically driven?
I assume that a Tesla robotaxi with a safety driver would also be legal transport if you’re drunk. I rarely drink and I have no plans to give any money to Elmo, so I’m not in position to test that hypothesis. This is not legal advice, whatever you decide to do with your one precious life.
When I first saw the headline for this article, I thought it was going to be about how robotaxis would (someday) affect the overall drunk driving rate. We had a similar discussion about a decade ago about Uber’s effect on drunk driving. Modern research backs up the assertion that Uber did have a positive effect, though the scale of it was relatively modest. Autonomous vehicles have made much broader and all-encompassing claims about vehicular safety, and those claims remain unsettled. I can believe that Waymos are having some modest positive effect in the cities where they now operate, but the sample size is probably not large enough yet to separate any signal from the noise. Waymo’s effect on personal privacy is another matter, one that will also need some robust discussion to get a handle on.