There was a saying popular in Silicon Valley around the mid 2010s: “The last driver’s license holder is already born.” There is even a blog using this as its name. After a lull, it seems finally clear that this statement is, more or less, true in 2026. Ten more years of this and no one will be driving their cars.
Right now, there are two big trends in self-driving as I see it:
At the high end, Waymo (and its competitors) are offering a fully autonomous taxi service which scales quickly to new cities, is offering millions of rides a year, and is a full replacement for the taxi.
Automakers like BYD and companies like Wayve are increasingly offering high-quality self-driving capabilities for consumer vehicles, in a similar vein to Tesla’s Full Self Driving.
Not only are cars getting more intelligent, but more of them don’t even need humans. And this extends beyond personal automobiles to semi trucks, with Aurora recently bragging they can make the 15 hour trip from Phoenix to Fort Worth autonomously. In China, companies like Neolix have begun deploying self-driving delivery vans on roads (to sometimes hilarious results).
In this blog post, I’ll go over some of the recent news on self driving vehciles. If you’re interested in this or other robotics content, please subscribe below.
Waymo Continues To Expand
Waymo has at many times in the past faced skepticism that it could scale quickly. But this concern looks increasingly dated; they’re currently deployed in 10 cities, either through Uber or their own app. They’ve planned expansions to over 20 additional cities, including cold-weather cities like Buffalo. To fuel all this growth, they recently raised a $16 billion funding round. The scale of the operation is unmatched outside China (Baidu is the leader globally). To couple with this expansion, they’ve announced their next-generation vehicle, the Waymo Ojai, built by Chinese automaker Geely, which should greatly bring down per-unit costs while offering a spacious interior.
Waymo’s Remote Operators
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Waymo and its use of remote operators, especially after recent testimony to Congress. Waymo claims to use a surprisingly small number of operators (or “assistants” to use their preferred term): just 70 for a fleet of 3000+ autonomous vehicles.
These operators’ job is not to drive the vehicle. Instead, the operators will usually give fairly high-level instructions: telling a vehicle it can ignore an obstacle in the road, for example, or giving a sequence of waypoints for the vehicle to follow in order to get it out of a tight spot.
This system is not always perfect. A serious stress-test for Waymo happened during PG&E outages which resulted in traffic lights going dark:
Waymo vehicles stopped all over the city, blocking intersections and causing serious trouble for emergency vehicles. This was due to a spike in requests for help going back to their command centers from the autonomous vehicles, which seems to have taken down their system. They claim to have implemented new protocols to prevent this from happening again.
Likely, we will see growing pains like this continue. But remember this: we absolutely do know that Waymo is a lot safer than a human driver. The case for autonomy is clear.
Autonomy in Consumer Cars
Tesla’s autopilot continues to improve. But it’s not just Tesla: we see more and more consumer vehicles adding autonomy features — Rivian Driver+ and especially BYD God’s Eye are growing increasingly capable.
The case of BYD is particularly interesting. BYD is the world’s biggest automaker now, and its vehicles are consistently well-reviewed and well-liked. When it rolled out its God’s Eye 5.0 self-driving software, it did so across 2.3 million vehicles in China alone. God’s Eye uses a mixture of camera, ultrasonic, and radar sensors to achieve safe, reliable driver assistance.
According to BYD, this generates 160 million kilometers of driving data every day.
Legacy automakers are following along. Nissan, for example, is working with Wayve to deploy its self-driving software as ProPILOT on their new vehicles starting in 2027. Wayve has set ambitious goals, showing that its system is capable of driving in cities all over the world in 2025 — such as in their “90 cities in 90 days” initiative. This approach works without maps; they visited both to rural areas and to dense cities.
Wayve has a camera-only autonomy stack. What’s interesting about the Nissan approach is that it adds radar and lidar for “Ground Truth Perception,” adding extra safety guarantees on top of the camera-based autonomy from the Wayve Driver. With the low cost of lidar and radar, this would not be expected to add much to the cost of the vehicle; and the extra safety guarantees may be worth it.
Tesla Robotaxis in Austin
And of course, when speaking of consumer cars, we must proceed to discuss the elephant in the room: Tesla. Tesla has their own robotaxi service, and they recently rolled the first fully-autonomous, steering-wheel-free Cybercab off of their production line in Gigafactory Texas. They’re planning to expand their robotaxi program to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, up from just Austin and San Francisco.
However, Tesla has seen a spate of bad news lately. From AV Market Strategist:
The new crashes, from December 2025 and January 2026, include collisions with a fixed object at 17 mph, a bus while stationary, a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two backing incidents at 1-2 mph into a pole and a fixed object. Buried in the updated data is a revised report for a July 2025 crash that Tesla originally filed as “property damage only.” Five months later, Tesla quietly upgraded the injury severity to “Minor W/ Hospitalization.”
It’s not been all good news for Tesla in other areas either - for example, we saw a recent $243 million judgement against Tesla for an accident in Florida involving autopilot.
Tesla is taking a unique, extremely low cost approach, building a very cheap Cybercab that can be rapidly scaled. If the Waymo Ojai is in the $70k to $80k range, as I and others have estimated, the Cybercab is going to be probably a quarter of the price. This is a huge win for them, and is a result of a car with substantially less on board sensing and compute.
The big question is whether or not this is possible. Humans, after all, use quite a lot of compute to drive, at least; our brains are insanely powerful thinking machines. Vision-based autonomy is clearly possible, but Tesla might have trouble especially if they need to continue producing models for legacy hardware.
Still, the vision is incredible: I loved this video of a Tesla delivering itself to its new owner, for example; Tesla continues to sell the vision of the self-driving car better than anyone else.
Final Thoughts
Despite a few bumps in the metaphorical road, the progress towards ubiquitous self-driving cars seems possible. There are many forces driving this change: not just Waymo, Baidu, and the Tesla Cybercab, but the fact that the general level of autonomy on all cars seems to be going up year over year.
And I can’t wait. There are so many horrific stories like this one caused by people driving and making mistakes that cost lives. The world will be better off when this technology is everywhere. Again, these cars are a lot safer than a human driver. And with more and more cities seeing autonomous vehicles, I think a lot of the public opposition to these cars will fade away, defeated by the sheer convenience and the quality of the experience.
I hope this year we see honest, successful, high-quality competition for Waymo — from Nuro, Zoox, and Tesla — but this seems farther off, as all three companies seem significantly behind in the United States.
But my main prediction for 2026 is this: by the end of the year, self-driving cars will be boring. People’s fears will be largely assuaged, the recipe for scaling will be clear, and the technology will be broadly acknowledged as solved.
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The BYD/Wayve consumer AV trend is where edge AI meets its hardest real-world test: unlike geofenced robotaxis with known ODD, consumer vehicles need to handle any road, any carrier network, any weather. That means persistent eSIM-based multi-carrier connectivity with sub-100ms failover, continuous OTA model updates pushed to millions of vehicles simultaneously, and edge inference governance that ensures safety-critical decisions happen locally even when the network drops. Waymo's controlled fleet approach sidesteps this, but the consumer AV scaling race will be won by whoever solves distributed connectivity orchestration first -- not just perception.