Self-driving cars are in more cities than ever, but fatal incidents are prompting stricter oversight. The full picture.
The autonomous vehicle industry entered 2026 in a state of cautious expansion. Waymo now operates commercial robotaxi services in 12 US cities, Tesla's Full Self-Driving system has logged over 5 billion supervised miles, and Chinese players like Baidu's Apollo and Pony.ai are scaling rapidly in Shenzhen, Beijing, and Guangzhou.
Waymo's expansion has been the biggest success story. The Alphabet subsidiary's fifth-generation Driver (based on a custom Waymo Foundation Model that processes lidar, camera, and radar data simultaneously) has completed over 100,000 paid rides per week across its operating cities with a safety record significantly better than human drivers—0.6 injury-causing incidents per million miles, compared to 1.8 for human drivers nationally.
Tesla's approach—camera-only perception without lidar—continues to be controversial. FSD v13, released in late 2025, shows marked improvement in handling edge cases like construction zones and emergency vehicles, but still requires driver supervision. NHTSA data shows that Tesla vehicles with FSD engaged have 1.1 injury incidents per million miles—safer than the national average but not yet matching Waymo's lidar-equipped system.
Regulation is tightening in response to high-profile incidents. California's DMV has implemented new requirements for autonomous vehicle operators, including real-time telemetry reporting, mandatory disengagement data sharing, and minimum insurance requirements of $10 million per vehicle. The EU is developing a separate regulatory framework under the AI Act.
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The consensus among industry analysts is that fully autonomous vehicles will be a $2 trillion global market by 2035, but the path there will be defined by regulatory approval as much as technological capability.