For AV operators, the more important question is not simply what the law requires, but what it signals about the direction of risk, liability, and insurance in the autonomous mobility sector.
The AV industry has invested heavily in building safe, capable technology and that has a strong interest in continued, responsible deployment. Our purpose is not to suggest that SB 1246 creates liability where none existed. Rather, it is to help AV operators, their executives, risk managers, policy teams, and insurance partners think proactively about how the law may reshape the fact patterns, legal theories, and coverage questions that arise after an AV-related event.
Importantly, SB 1246 does not rewrite California's underlying liability framework. It does not impose strict liability on AV operators, replace negligence standards, or materially change the state's financial responsibility and insurance requirements for AV deployment. What it does is elevate the importance of operational readiness and post-event conduct, areas that have historically received less attention than vehicle performance itself in AV litigation and underwriting.
What SB 1246 actually changes
SB 1246 was authored in response to concerns from certain interested parties around autonomous vehicles stalling, losing connectivity, or otherwise becoming disabled in ways that could obstruct traffic or interfere with emergency operations. The bill's author has described the legislation as an effort to establish clear accountability when an AV crashes, breaks down, blocks a roadway during an emergency, or interferes with first responders.
SB 1246 will require AV companies to deploy local incident technicians who can respond to crashes and obstructions upon request from emergency personnel and to sufficiently staff remote operations that can respond immediately to incidents. The law also requires AV companies to notify local jurisdictions and emergency dispatch centers during fleetwide system failures, including the location and status of affected vehicles. SB 1246 draws a distinction between “remote driving,” in which a human takes direct control of a vehicle, and “remote assistance,” in which a human advises or issues instructions while the autonomous system remains in control.
The law sets requirements for where remote personnel must be located and licensed. Local authorities may impose fines when an AV blocks first-responder operations for longer than a specified period, with final thresholds, penalty amounts, and response-time standards to be established through DMV rulemaking before the law takes effect.
Each of these provisions focuses on the same underlying concern: how an AV company behaves once something has already gone wrong, not whether the underlying autonomous driving technology performed safely in the first instance.
What SB 1246 does not change
It is equally important, particularly for an AV operator evaluating its risk exposure, to understand what the law does not do.
SB 1246 does not:
Create a new standard of strict liability in California for AV companies.
Eliminate the traditional negligence framework that have governed AV litigation to date.
Displace product liability theories, which have centered on software, sensors, and autonomous decision-making, and have been a primary vehicle for AV-related claims.
Rewrite California's financial responsibility or insurance requirements for AV operators.
Mandate new minimum limits, new lines of coverage, or a new compulsory insurance product for autonomous fleets.
In short, a plaintiff bringing a claim against an AV operator will still need to establish damages under existing legal doctrine. What SB 1246 may do is supply new facts and new standards of conduct that can be woven into the existing framework. That is precisely why AV companies should give the law careful attention from a risk and insurance standpoint rather than dismiss it as a pure compliance matter.
From accident to incident: A subtle but important shift
Most automobile liability insurance, and most of the legal doctrine built around it, has historically been organized around the concept and insurance policy definition of an accident. Perhaps a collision occurs. A vehicle strikes another vehicle, a pedestrian, or property. The resulting legal and insurance analysis centers on that discrete event: who caused it, whether there was a defect, and what damages flowed directly from it.
SB 1246 is organized around a different concept: the incident. The law is concerned with what happens when a vehicle becomes disabled, when a remote operations or assistance systems fail, when a fleetwide outage occurs, or when an autonomous vehicle obstructs a roadway or interferes with emergency responders, regardless of whether any collision has occurred at all.
In many of the scenarios the law contemplates, there may be no accident in the traditional sense: no collision, no property damage, no direct contact between the vehicle and an injured party. There is simply a vehicle that is not behaving as intended, and a surrounding set of operational questions about how quickly and effectively the company responded.
This is a meaningful distinction. Insurance products, claims-handling protocols, and decades of case law have been built to answer questions about accidents. AV operators and their insurance partners should recognize that SB 1246 is asking a different question, one about incident management, and that litigation may increasingly follow the law's lead.
A hypothetical worth taking seriously
Consider a scenario where an AV experiences a software or connectivity failure and comes to a stop in a busy urban corridor. The vehicle itself strikes no one. No property is damaged. In isolation, this might have historically been treated as a minor operational inconvenience, the kind of event that generates an internal incident report but little else.
Now suppose that several blocks away, a bystander suffers a sudden cardiac event. An ambulance is dispatched along its normal route, only to be delayed by the disabled autonomous vehicle blocking the corridor. The patient survives, but claims outcomes are materially worse than if a more timely response occurred.
In this scenario, the injured party never interacted with the AV, which never struck anyone and was not itself involved in an accident with the patient. Under a traditional accident-based framework, it is not obvious whether this individual would ever had standing to bring a claim against the AV operator at all.
SB 1246 changes the texture of that analysis, even if it does not change the underlying law of standing or causation. By establishing specific expectations around incident response times, remote operations staffing, and communication with emergency dispatch, the law creates a documented, external benchmark against which an operator's conduct can be measured. A plaintiff's attorney representing that patient, or the patient's family, may argue that the AV operator's failure to clear the obstruction, or to communicate its location and status to dispatch, caused an independent and compensable harm, separate and apart from any vehicle collision.
Whether courts ultimately accept that an AV operator owed a duty of care to a third party with no direct connection to the vehicle is a legal question that will likely be tested. But the law provides plaintiffs with a more concrete narrative, and a statutory reference point, for making that argument than existed before.
For AV operators, the practical implication is that the universe of potential claimants may no longer be limited to those who were struck by or riding in an autonomous vehicle. It may extend to third parties whose harm allegedly arises entirely from the operational consequences of a vehicle's presence on the road. That is a meaningfully different exposure to underwrite, consider internally, and to defend.
Implications for plaintiff theories and litigation strategy
Historically, AV litigation has centered on a relatively narrow set of questions:
Did the autonomous system operate safely?
Was there a defect in design or software?
Did the vehicle's operation cause the plaintiff's injury?
SB 1246 could broaden those inquiries. Plaintiffs' attorneys may increasingly explore a parallel set of questions directed at the operator's conduct after a vehicle became disabled or an outage occurred:
Did the company respond within the timeframes contemplated by the statute?
Were qualified remote personnel or local incident technicians adequately staffed and available when needed?
Was communication with emergency dispatch timely and accurate?
Did any delay or operational shortfall contribute to, or worsen, the harm at issue?
None of this guarantees that such claims will succeed, and much will depend on how courts treat duty and causation in cases involving no direct vehicle contact. But it does mean that discovery, expert testimony, and settlement negotiations in future AV matters may expand beyond vehicle telemetry and sensor logs to include incident response timelines, staffing records, dispatch communications, and internal escalation protocols. AV operators should expect that their operational playbooks, not just their autonomous driving systems, will be placed under a microscope.
While this law is limited to California, it is also feasible an AV operator with vehicles on the road in other states may be questioned about certain operational standards in place in California, but not in their state.
Coverage implications across auto, general, and product liability
A shift from accident to incident may have real consequences for how AV-related losses are likely to be evaluated across existing insurance programs.
Auto liability
Auto liability has been the primary mechanism for responding to AV bodily injury and property damage claims arising from the ownership, maintenance, or use of a vehicle. In California, this is also the type of insurance coverage the state requires AV manufacturers to maintain under its vehicle code. Surety and qualified self-insurance are also permitted in the state statues.
As claims increasingly involve roadway obstruction, delayed recovery, or failed remote intervention rather than a direct collision, insurers and operators may face new questions about whether such harms fall within the traditional scope of auto liability coverage, or whether they are more appropriately treated as a separate operational exposure.
General liability
Allegations centered on a company's failure to manage a known hazard, failure to deploy adequate incident response resources, or failure to coordinate with emergency services may increasingly resemble general liability (GL) or premises-style negligence claims rather than conventional auto claims. AV operators should expect GL programs, and the interplay between GL and auto exclusions, to receive greater scrutiny as these fact patterns emerge. However, this type of insurance typically excludes losses arising from the ownership, maintenance or use of autos subject to minimum financial responsibility regulations.
Product liability
Product liability will remain central to claims alleging that a software, sensor, or design defect caused a vehicle to fail or become disabled in the first place. What may change is the second half of the causal chain: a product claim may increasingly be paired with an allegation that the technology failure triggered an operational incident, and that the operator's subsequent response, or lack of one, caused additional, separately compensable harm. This will become further complicated as AV manufacturers (as defined in the California statues) consider selling AVs equipped with their technology to third parties.
For AV operators, the practical risk is less about any single coverage line failing to respond and more about the potential for disputes among auto, GL, and product insurers over which policy, or which combination of policies, is triggered by a given loss. Clear, well-documented operational protocols, and early engagement with brokers and insurers on how these scenarios are intended to be covered, will matter more than ever.
The cyber and technology E&O dimension
Perhaps the most important long-term implication of SB 1246 for AV operators involves lines of coverage that have traditionally sat outside AV risk discussions altogether, such as cyber liability and technology errors and omissions (E&O).
Modern AV fleets are not simply vehicles; they are integrated technology platforms dependent on cloud infrastructure, telematics, continuous connectivity, remote operations systems, fleet management software, and centralized monitoring. Many of the scenarios that SB 1246 is designed to address — a fleetwide outage, a loss of connectivity between vehicles and control centers, a failure of remote assistance systems, a breakdown in automated dispatch notifications — are, at their core, technology operations failures rather than mechanical or driving failures.
If a future incident originates in a software deployment issue, a cloud service disruption, or a failure of the systems used to monitor and communicate with a fleet, plaintiffs and insurers alike may frame the loss as a technology services failure rather than, or in addition to, a vehicle operation issue. That framing points directly at cyber and technology E&O coverage, lines that many AV operators have historically treated as adjacent to, rather than central to, their core liability program.
AV operators should use SB 1246 as an opportunity to revisit how their cyber and technology E&O programs are structured relative to their auto, GL, and product liability coverage. They should ensure that incident response, business continuity, and fleet monitoring failures are not left in a gap between policies written by different underwriting teams with different assumptions about the nature of AV risk.
Strategic Takeaway
SB 1246 should not be read by the AV industry as a liability expansion statute. It does not change who can be sued, under what legal theory, or under what insurance requirement. What it does is formalize a set of operational expectations, incident response times, staffing standards, and communication protocols, that plaintiffs, regulators, and courts may use as a reference point when evaluating an AV company's conduct should something go wrong.
For years, the central challenge for the AV industry has been demonstrating that autonomous vehicles can operate safely. The next challenge, and the one SB 1246 puts into sharper focus, is continuously demonstrating that AV companies can operate resiliently: that they can detect, respond to, and communicate about incidents quickly enough to prevent a vehicle malfunction from becoming someone else's emergency.
Operators that get ahead of this shift, by documenting incident response capabilities, stress-testing remote operations and communication protocols, and aligning their auto, GL, products, cyber, and technology E&O programs around a shared understanding of where AV risk is heading, will be best positioned to manage both the litigation and the underwriting conversations that SB 1246 is likely to invite.
