In May 2025, the future of self-driving cars in Australia had a clear schedule.
A national Automated Vehicle Safety Law would arrive sometime in 2026, and automated vehicles would follow once the rules were ready to be rolled out.
In the end, this happened the other way around.
Since 18 September 2025, Tesla owners in Australia, Queensland included, have been able to pay for Full Self-Driving (Supervised), first at A$10,100 upfront and, since April 2026, by A$149-a-month subscription only. The software steers, brakes and threads the car through roundabouts and intersections on ordinary public roads.
Australia and New Zealand were the first right-hand-drive markets in the world to get this technology, but the law that was supposed to govern this moment has still not been passed, or even introduced to Parliament.
The federal government's Connected and Automated Vehicle Action Plan (CAV), released in October 2025, pushed the Automated Vehicle Safety Law out to 2027.
Information Age, the Australian Computer Society's publication, summed up this gap: "Given that ADS vehicles are already operating on Australian roads, the new CAV Action Plan's two-year timeframe shows just how far behind the curve the government's regulations are."
The scorecard: what was promised, what actually happened
In May 2025, the official roadmap was law first, vehicles second and national rollout to follow. Almost none of this happened to that schedule, and the parts that did weren’t on that roadmap.
The current national position was decided on 21 November 2025, when Transport Ministers agreed to allow the conditional deployment of automated vehicles from 2027 in selected locations, with full national guidelines to follow.
The failure to adhere to the original timeline did nothing to slow the software. The Driven reported in June 2026 that Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised v14, a major new version of the software, had begun rolling out to Australian cars.
The car can drive. You are still the driver
Every self-driving system you can buy in Australia today, Tesla's included, is classified SAE Level 2: driver assistance, not autonomy. That one fact carries almost all of the legal weight.
Swinburne University's Professor Hussein Dia describes FSD as "essentially more advanced driver assistance." Calling it "closer to a diligent learner driver than a professional chauffeur." For Level 2 systems, he notes, the supervising person in the driver's seat remains legally responsible for crashes.
Tesla says the same thing: "Drivers must maintain proper control of the vehicle at all times, pay attention and be prepared to take immediate action at any moment."
In Queensland, that duty is not just a new law scrambling to catch up. The requirement to remain in proper control of a vehicle is in the state's existing road rules and the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 (Qld), and it applies regardless of whether or not the car is being steered by software.
This makes viral clips of self-driving vehicles worth considering. Videos of Teslas rolling themselves through McDonald's drive-thrus spread widely in late 2025, including in Australia. However, The Driven's Australian reviewer called the system "truly mind blowing, but not flawless," and had to take over in a McDonald's car park when the software steered them towards the drive-thru by mistake.
The launch had a regulatory asterisk, too. In May 2025, Tesla demonstrated FSD in Melbourne's CBD, hook turn included, without the permit Victoria requires for on-road automated vehicle trials, an oversight which was exposed by ABC's 7.30.
Victoria's transport department confirmed it had "not approved any testing of fully autonomous vehicles in Melbourne's CBD."
Also read: The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars: Who's Responsible in an Accident?
Waymo is circling Australia. Queensland is not on its map
While Tesla sells supervised software to private owners, the world's largest robotaxi operator has been preparing to enter the Australian market.
Waymo wrote to federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King in October 2025 seeking a briefing on its "2026 plans in Australia." It has reportedly discussed a Sydney launch with the NSW Government, but no Queensland plans have been reported.
Its safety case is built entirely on US statistics. Across 220.6 million driverless miles in American cities, Waymo reports 94% fewer crashes involving serious injury or worse than comparable human drivers. An earlier study with reinsurer Swiss Re found that there were 92% fewer bodily injury claims across 25.3 million miles.
The company is currently scaling quickly, with a US$16 billion raise in February 2026 to expand into more than 20 cities, including London and Tokyo.
The obstacle in Australia is not demand, it’s that road rules in every state and territory still require a human driver, which means genuinely driverless operation won’t be possible until the national law and matching state legislation arrive.
The most sceptical state in the country
Queenslanders want self-driving cars less than anyone else in the country.
An iSelect survey of 500 Australians, taken in the weeks before the FSD launch, found that 44% opposed having fully driverless cars in their local area. Queensland was the most negative state, with 54% of people in opposition.
The comfort ladder in the same survey is steep. Just over half of respondents were fine with basic driver assistance, but only 5% were comfortable with full autonomy anywhere. Just 18% of respondents said they would be happy to buy or ride in a self-driving car.
That scepticism is a little strange considering Queensland's own history. The state ran some of the country's most ambitious trials, including the ZOE2 research vehicle operating at high automation under special permits, and the Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot between 2019 and 2021.
There has been no major new Queensland trial or funding announcements for 2025 or 2026. The government programme wound down just as the technology reached private vehicles, which means the live experiment is now running on ordinary roads by ordinary drivers.
The first legal test is about marketing, not crashes
The part that nobody predicted in May 2025 is that Australia's first significant self-driving legal battle has nothing to do with a crash.
A Federal Court class action, filed in February 2025 by Brisbane-based firm JGA Saddler, alleges that Tesla vehicles suffered "phantom braking," overstated their range and carried hardware unable to deliver promised self-driving capability. Reports put owner registrations at around 10,000 as of mid-2025.
This makes the relevant legal issue a consumer-law one: what buyers were promised compared to what the product is actually capable of. No Australian prosecution or injury judgment involving FSD or a similar system has been reported thus far.
The crash-law question is still to be answered. Queensland's compulsory third party scheme under the Motor Accident Insurance Act 1994 (Qld) is fault-based and attaches to the at-fault driver, which works as long as a human is supervising every system on the road.
It has no mechanism for an injury that’s caused by a machine with no humans at fault, but the National Transport Commission is currently reviewing this gap. Insurance law firm Barry Nilsson highlights the NTC's own finding that "more work will be required" to develop an approach to injuries caused by automated driving systems.
Also read: Semi-Autonomous Vehicles: Enhancing Road Safety or Paving the Way for New Risks?
What Queensland drivers can actually do
The gap between what the technology does and what the law says about it creates several practical risks.
A few things follow directly from the rules as they stand as of August 2026:
- Treat every system on sale today as assistance. Nothing available in Australia is approved to be driven unsupervised. “Full Self-Driving” describes an ambition, not a legal status.
- Assume full responsibility while it drives. If a supervised car runs a red light or hits a pedestrian, the law considers it as the driver's act. "The car was driving" is not a recognised defence anywhere in Australia.
- Stay genuinely ready to take over. The Australian reviewer's car-park intervention was low-stakes, but the same lapse at 100km/h on the Bruce Highway certainly would not be.
- Know that the compensation pathway is unchanged. For anyone injured in a Queensland crash involving a supervised system, the claim runs against the human driver and the CTP scheme, just like any other collision would be.
- Watch 2027. When genuinely driverless vehicles eventually arrive under the upcoming framework, responsibility for driving is intended to be shifted onto the corporate entity behind the system. That is the design, but not yet the law.
The old story about autonomous vehicles in Australia was about waiting for the law, the trials and the rollout. The new story is about a gap.
For at least another year, every "self-driving" car on a Queensland road must have a legally responsible human inside it, whatever the software is capable of doing.
The technology has already changed what the car does, but it has yet to change who answers for it, and anyone caught in that gap after a crash is in territory the law has not finished mapping out.
