NJ Bill S1677 Mandates Multimodal Sensors for Autonomous Vehicles (July 2026)

A new bill advancing through the New Jersey legislature, S1677, seeks to establish a three-year autonomous vehicle pilot program. The legislation requires fully driverless commercial vehicles to carry a camera system plus two other distinct sensing modalities (such as radar and LiDAR). This regulatory move represents a shift toward mandatory hardware redundancy, effectively blocking camera-only architectures from operating commercial driverless networks in the state.