I spent the past 12 months covering robotaxis for the San Francisco Examiner and have taken nearly a dozen rides in Cruise driverless cars over the past few months. During my reporting, I’ve been struck by the shortage of urgency in the general public discourse about robotaxis. I’ve come to consider that the majority people, including many powerful decision makers, should not aware of how quickly this industry is advancing, or how severe the near-term labor and transportation impacts may very well be. 

Hugely vital decisions about robotaxis are being made in relative obscurity by appointed agencies just like the California Public Utilities Commission. Legal frameworks remain woefully inadequate: within the Golden State, cities don’t have any regulatory authority over the robotaxis that ply their streets, and police legally cannot cite them for moving violations. 

It’s high time for the general public and its elected representatives to play a more energetic role in shaping the longer term of this latest technology. Prefer it or not, robotaxis are here. Now comes the difficult work of deciding what to do about them. 

After years of false guarantees, it’s now widely acknowledged that the dream of owning your very own sleep/gaming/makeup mobility pod stays years, if not a long time, away. Tesla’s misleadingly named Autopilot system, the closest thing to autonomous driving in a mass-market automotive, is under investigation by each the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Justice Department. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard, government-approved framework for evaluating the security of autonomous vehicles.

Media coverage of robotaxis has been rightfully skeptical. Journalists (myself included) have highlighted strange robo-­behavior, concerning software failures, and Cruise and Waymo’s lack of transparency about their data. Cruise’s driverless vehicles, particularly, have shown an alarming tendency to inexplicably stop in the midst of the road, blocking traffic for prolonged periods of time. San Francisco officials have documented no less than 92 such incidents in only six months, including three that disrupted emergency responders. 

These critical stories, though vital, obscure the overall trend, which has been moving steadily within the robotaxi industry’s favor. Over the past few years, Cruise and Waymo have cleared several major regulatory hurdles, expanded into latest markets, and racked up over 1,000,000 relatively uneventful, truly driverless miles each in major American cities. 

Robotaxis are operationally quite different from personally owned autonomous vehicles, and so they are in a significantly better position for business deployment. They may be unleashed inside a strictly limited area where they’re well trained; their use may be closely monitored by the corporate that designed them; and so they can immediately be pulled off the road in bad weather or if there’s one other issue.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard, government-approved framework for evaluating the security of autonomous vehicles. In a paper on its first million “rider-only” miles, Waymo had two police-reportable crashes (with no injuries) and 18 minor contact events, about half of which involved a human driver hitting a stationary Waymo. The corporate cautions against direct comparisons with human drivers because there are rarely analogous data sets. Cruise, then again, claims that its robotaxis experienced 53% fewer collisions than the everyday human ride-hail driver in San Francisco of their first million driverless miles, and 73% fewer collisions with a meaningful risk of injury.