For the self-driving car industry, first responder guidance is a collective action problem.

Tesla’s Cybercab, a gold-tinted self-driving sedan outfitted with doors that eject sideways and upward, officially hit the road earlier this month. In some cities, the vehicles have mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, while in others, like Austin, they’ve begun accepting rides and offering autonomous service.

Like myriad other Elon Musk projects, the cars have polarized the public. But they’ve also raised concerns from firefighters and police officers who wonder how they’ll deal with robotaxis in emergencies, highlighting the new challenges raised by the self-driving car era.

Indeed, new guidance released by the company outlines a series of new responsibilities for first responders who might interact with Cybercabs in an emergency. When they arrive on the scene of an accident, Tesla says, a firefighter might need to call two different support numbers and wait for a company staffer to connect with the vehicle. The instructions also say that law enforcement may need to reach out to the company if they want Tesla to enact a geofence—basically, a software command that bans a self-driving car from traveling to a given area for a certain period of time.

The instructions also say that first responders need to understand the unique doors and cameras integrated into the Cybercab, and learn to recognize the labels that denote when the vehicle is in autonomous mode. First responders may try to operate the vehicle in manual mode, but this requires using a touch screen that may be difficult to access while wearing gloves, as other outlets have noted. The guide also notes that turning on the vehicle via the touch screen after a collision comes with other risks. “Trying to support low voltage power on a vehicle that has been in a collision could lead to a possible electrical fire,” the guide says.

It’s not clear that Cybercabs have yet caused issues for first responders, but residents in cities where they’ve debuted have already cited problems. One customer reported, for instance, that they were trapped in a hotel garage after a Cybercab couldn’t navigate its way out.

That’s a lot to consider, and might constitute too much extra responsibility for first responders, explains Jeffrey Lindsey, a former fire chief and the director of fire and emergency services at the University of Florida’s design college.

“When you arrive on the scene of an incident, your main focus in the very beginning is scene safety to make sure everything’s safe. You’re taking in the whole scene. You’re trying to figure out what’s going on,” he says. Often, Lindsey notes, it’s just one officer arriving on a scene, and calling a support center for help adds another burden to what’s already “a full plate of things they have to accomplish.”

There are signs this is getting pushback. NBC has already reported on problems with the emergency hotline numbers, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has raised questions about whether the Cybercab can be operated manually. Tesla, it’s worth noting, doesn’t have an amazing track record on building hardware that’s intuitive for emergency response. Much concern has been raised about the unique doors on other Tesla car models, which, Bloomberg reported last year, can trap people inside cars when they run out of power.

Because Tesla vehicles are all-electric, the company has also been charged with educating fire departments across the country on the unique nature of lithium-ion battery fires. How successful that effort has been remains unclear.

Caution ahead

But the challenges raised by Cybercab aren’t unique to Tesla; they extend to self-driving cars more broadly. First responders have struggled to interact with all sorts of AVs, including those manufactured by Waymo, which is arguably the industry’s leading company. As Fast Company has reported, issues involving the first responder line at Waymo long predate the arrival of Cybercab, and include problems with responsiveness and responding to hand signals. Earlier this summer, the NHTSA sent a letter to the entire industry warning about the risks of AVs interfering with first responders.

The issues faced by Tesla and Waymo, and likely other robotaxi developers, raise a question about first responder capacity. Should multiple companies win the race to develop self-driving cars, it appears that first responders might be expected to learn the peculiarities of multiple car companies. Is it reasonable to expect police and firefighters—already busy in an emergency—to identify the manufacturer of the AV they encounter, find the emergency number for that manufacturer, and then correctly locate and sort through the corresponding first responder guide?

Alternatively, the companies might get together and come up with one unified system for guiding first responders in an emergency, though they haven’t done so yet.

“The central issue, in my view, is the need for independent research to develop standardized, manufacturer-neutral emergency-response protocols,” Prabodh Panindre, a professor at New York University who studies technology and fire science, tells Fast Company. Future protocols for how first responders might deal with these vehicles, he argues, need to take into account the cognitive and training workload levied on firefighters and cops. Ideally, Panindre says, manufacturers, along with fire departments, researchers, and regulators, would work together to establish “practical standard operating procedures.”