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The Robot Chauffeur Has Arrived, Sort Of
In a few cities it’s actually happening. Californians took over 1.2 million rides in commercial self-driving cars in December alone, a 500% surge in 19 months per the California Public Utilities Commission. So the robots are out there driving real people around. Whether that scales to everywhere else, or stays a thing that works in good weather in San Francisco, is a whole other convo.
Waymo Is Winning, Kinda
Waymo has logged over 170 million rider-only miles without a human driver and their safety numbers look good on paper. University of Michigan professor Henry Liu has a problem with that though. He says that roughly 95% of disengagement or accident situations are completely routine scenarios, where a human driver wouldn’t worry about. And nobody outside Waymo has done an independent analysis of the raw data. So the “we’re safer than humans” headline is real, but it’s got some issues. And as the next two sections show, the “kinda winning” issues aren’t just math.
The School Bus Problem Nobody Can Explain Away
Waymo vehicles blew past stopped school buses with flashing red lights and deployed stop arms. First in Metro Atlanta, where a viral September 2025 video triggered a NHTSA probe in October, then later in Austin, where Austin ISD’s bus cameras saw at least 20 violations in a school year. Waymo said it implemented software updates by November 17, but then came another violation on December 1. Its 20th citation came after that fix. A voluntary software recall followed on December 10, but the violations kept coming. By spring, the NTSB was investigating a fresh incident from March 25. NHTSA and NTSB both have open investigations.
Next in January 2026 a Waymo struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during morning drop-off. The car hit the child at about 6 mph after braking hard from roughly 17 mph when the kid darted out from behind a double-parked SUV. Waymo and NHTSA reported minor injuries; Santa Monica police called it a low-speed, non-injury collision. Not a great look for a company asking you to trust it with your commute, and both NHTSA and NTSB opened investigations.
Tesla Has a Car With No Steering Wheel and Unfinished Software
Tesla started volume production of the Cybercab at Giga Texas in late April. A “car” with no steering wheel, no pedals, but priced under $30k. On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Musk said unsupervised Full Self-Driving is coming “probably Q4” of this year, which is a timeline most people are filing under “yeah sure” or “bullshit.”
The current supervised robotaxi fleet crashes at roughly 4x the rate of human drivers (one crash per 57,000 miles versus a human benchmark of one per 229,000). Musk even said the software sometimes gets cars stuck in loops or “scared to move.” He confirmed on that call that millions of Hardware 3 owners need full computer and camera replacements to ever get real unsupervised FSD. That’s the same FSD a lot of them already paid for when he made the “aspirational” (read BS) claim that one day your car will make money for you while you work. So, Elon whatever happened to that sales tactic claim???
Where Things Actually Stand
In Phoenix, SF, LA, or Austin you can hail a robotaxi right now and chances are it will work okay. Everywhere else, not yet. The World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group both put out research saying most new cars through 2030 are still going to be driver-assist, not self-driving. Also drivers of most new cars will be keeping their hands on the wheel long after 2035. The robots are out there, they’re just still figuring some pretty important things out.
Sources: California Public Utilities Commission, Waymo, TheStreet, University of Michigan, ABC News, CNBC, Electrek, TechCrunch, World Economic Forum, Boston Consulting Group