is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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Earlier this year, a mysterious new company called Tensor announced itself to the world by claiming it would be the first to sell fully autonomous vehicles to customers at scale. The news didn’t make much of a splash. No one had ever heard of Tensor, so it was the kind of announcement easy to dismiss as vaporware. But the idea was not unfamiliar. In fact, some of the world’s biggest companies are interested in selling driverless cars to individual customers. After all, if you can already hail a fully autonomous vehicle, why not own one too?
But it won’t be easy. The technological and legal hurdles are immense. Today’s robotaxis are restricted in where they can travel and under what conditions; it’s unclear whether people would accept similar limitations for a vehicle they owned. And mishaps, like driving through an active police scene as Waymo recently did, becomes even more alarming when it’s a privately owned vehicle.
But for the companies investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the technology, it was always inevitable that robotaxis would just be the beginning.
Possible vs. practical
For years, experts dismissed the idea of privately owned autonomous vehicles, arguing that the technology was too expensive for private sales. Instead, fleet-owned robotaxis were the safer bet, helping amortize the costs of all the sensors and high-powered computing — said to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — needed to enable the cars to drive themselves. But now the costs for much of that equipment, including lidar, is coming down, resurfacing the idea that autonomous vehicles can be cheap enough to sell to regular people.
It may eventually be possible, but would it be practical? An autonomous vehicle has different requirements than a conventional one, with a myriad of sensors that need to be cleaned and calibrated on an almost daily basis. Would the owner be up to the task?
Some of the companies are working on self-cleaning sensors. Waymo, for example, has tiny wipers that keep its lidar sensors clean of dirt and debris. Tesla has said it is working on robot vacuums to keep its robotaxi interiors tidy. But neither company has outlined how regular people will be expected to maintain their privately owned robot car — if it ever comes to that.
If you can already hail a fully autonomous vehicle, why not own one too?
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