Robotaxis on public roads
Driverless vehicles are reaching passengers faster than the rules that govern them, and those rules are being written in three places at once — federal certification, state permits and state legislatures. We track each decision and who it actually binds.
The fifteenth Waymo market opened on 14 September with a permit for 1,000 vehicles. Zoox already runs there, and Tesla and Motional are coming: the first real field.
8 Sep 2026 Atoms Denies Building Robotaxis. It Confirms Uber May Use Its Technology for Ridesharing.The FT says Kalanick's company is building robotaxi tech; Atoms calls itself an industrial software business. Both can be true, and the denial addresses the label rather than the a...
5 Sep 2026 NHTSA Is Auditing Tesla's Cybercab Certification. Zoox Took Four Years and an Exemption.Audit query AQ26002 opened the day the Cybercab began carrying passengers. It does not investigate a crash — it asks Tesla to justify certifying a car with no steering wheel agains...
4 Sep 2026 Tesla's Cybercab Is Carrying Passengers in Austin, With 45 Vehicles AuthorisedTesla is carrying paying passengers in a two-seater with no steering wheel. The launch was a closed event with no livestream, confirmed afterwards by a website update.
31 Aug 2026 Waymo's Software Injured 16 Test Drivers. The Record Says Transdev.Every public argument about robotaxi safety concerns passengers and pedestrians. The only injuries anyone has counted happened to the people in the driver's seat, and they are logg...
30 Aug 2026 New Jersey's Robotaxi Bill Would Exclude Tesla Without Naming ItS1677 mentions no manufacturer and mandates no technology. It requires a camera system plus two further sensing modalities, and exactly one major operator has none of the second ki...
29 Aug 2026 London's Robotaxis Are Late Because the Regulator Has Not Written the RulesUber and Wayve, Waymo and Baidu are all stalled at the same point, and it is not engineering. Transport for London has not published the guidance operators must satisfy, and no veh...
22 Aug 2026 Nevada Approved Thousands Of Robotaxis. Tesla's Own Engineer Says They Will Not Arrive.The Nevada Transportation Authority granted Tesla up to 5,000 vehicles, Waymo 1,000 and Uber 1,000 across Clark County over twelve months. At the same hearing Tesla's Cybercab chie...
15 Aug 2026 2,000 Robotaxis, Five European Cities. One of Them Exists.Pony.ai and Uber will put more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities. Four are unnamed and none has a date, so the number has no denominator. The structure underneath it...
7 Jul 2026 Tesla Launches Fully Unsupervised Robotaxi Rides in Miami — Its First With No Safety Monitor From Day OneTesla launched its Robotaxi service in Miami on 3 July 2026 with no safety monitor in the car from day one — its first market outside Texas to skip the supervised phase entirely, a...
1 Jun 2026 Waymo's newest robotaxi is Chinese-built, and it is already picking up ridersWaymo has started letting select riders into its next robotaxi, a minivan-style vehicle built on a Zeekr chassis from China. The company calls it the Ojai, says it is designed to m...