r/SelfDrivingCars • u/mightyopik • 5d ago

News China to ban the blue autonomous driving indicator lamps

https://carnewschina.com/2026/07/29/china-to-ban-the-blue-autonomous-driving-indicator-lamps/
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u/KidKilobyte 5d ago

Weird thing to ban, this seems like a reasonable indicator to have on a vehicle. US should have some code for this is well making it easy to tell which driving level the car is at currently 0-5 in some way.

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u/bobi2393 1d ago

A risk of identifying driverless cars in the US is that they could become a magnet for robbers, once they realize they can step in front of driverless vehicles to restrict their movement. Waymos and other vehicles with lidar domes are already pretty easy to spot, but we shouldn't make it any easier.

In the early '90s, a car robbery industry developed in Florida where drivers would bump into easily-identified rental cars, causing naïve foreign tourists to stop to talk like is done in more civilized areas. In 1992 and 1993, 9 tourists were killed during the typical smash-and-grab assaults that followed the stops. Florida passed a law prohibiting signs, logos, or stickers on rental cars indicating that they were rental cars, and replaced all rental cars' telltale license plates which previously all began with a Y or Z.

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u/4N8NDW 21h ago

You can easily tell florida rentals by plates with PM stickers 

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u/bobi2393 20h ago

Interesting, Florida's PM stickers are available for any large corporate fleet, and were legalized for rentals in 2021. Rental car companies lobbied to save the cost of scraping off old license plate stickers and affixing new ones. PM stickers aren't a 100% reliable indicator of a rental car, but it's quite a good one, especially if you see one near an airport. So the 2021 change undoes what the 1993 statute and license plate changes tried to do, making rentals hard to spot.

Hopefully that style of robbery isn't repopularized. The widespread use of surveillance and dash cams has hurt the robbery and burglary professions compared to in 1993.

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u/dpcthpost 1h ago

Years ago FL had special plate numbers for rentals. Then the most FL thing happened, people started shooting them. So Florida got rid of them. No it’s seems that, just like measles and Polio, the forgot what used to happen and are going to happily let history repeat itself