On a chilly Moscow morning, tram No. 10 glides from Kulakov Street to Shchukinskaya metro station with nobody steering it — a service that has run since September 2025 with a backup operator riding along just in case something goes wrong. That kind of arrangement has operated in a legal gray zone for years. On November 12, Russia's government approved the final draft of a law meant to end the ambiguity: a bill "On Highly Automated Vehicles" that spells out rules for self-driving cars, trucks, taxis and trams nationwide.
The bill has been five years in the making. Russia's Transport Ministry began drafting it in 2021, and Meduza, citing the business daily Kommersant, reported that the cabinet signed off on the final version this week. It has not yet gone to the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, but officials say it will be submitted "in the near future."
What the law actually covers
The legislation addresses three questions operators have been waiting on: who is liable when a self-driving vehicle crashes, what safeguards automakers must build into onboard software to protect it from tampering, and which systems — sensors, fail-safes, data recorders — an autonomous vehicle must carry before it can legally operate on public roads. Those are the same unresolved questions slowing autonomous vehicle rollouts in other large markets, from the US, where there is still no federal self-driving statute, to the UK, which is still working through implementation of its own Automated Vehicles Act.
Russia already has more autonomous vehicles on the road than the legal gap might suggest. Self-driving cars, trucks and trams have operated since 2018, almost always with a human operator on board as backup, under a patchwork of regional experiments rather than one national framework. Moscow's No. 10 tram is the most visible example, and the city's mayor has said the driverless tram fleet should grow to 15 vehicles by the end of 2026 and 25 by 2027. A durable national law would let operators plan fleet expansion and insurance arrangements without relying on case-by-case regional permissions that can be revoked or altered locally.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
Russia's move comes as autonomous vehicle law is being rewritten in fits and starts worldwide, and often lagging well behind deployment. Washington, D.C.'s city council recently killed a robotaxi legalization bill on a tied vote, citing safety and jobs concerns, while China has moved faster on commercial robotaxi permits in cities like Wuhan and Beijing than most Western jurisdictions. The EU, meanwhile, continues to work through type-approval frameworks for automated driving systems that vary by member state.
A national liability and safety framework would put Russia ahead of some Western peers on paper, even though its autonomous fleet remains small compared with Chinese robotaxi operators or Waymo's US footprint. The real test will come once the bill reaches the State Duma: whether lawmakers narrow or widen the rules on data recorders and liability will determine whether Russian operators can scale past backup-operator pilots toward fully driverless commercial service.