Self-Driving FAQ: Every Question, Answered

Neither. Tesla sells it as "FSD (Supervised)", a Level 2 driver-assistance system: the driver must watch the road and take over at any moment. Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin, which began in 2025 with a safety monitor aboard, is a separate operation.

Level 4. There is no driver and no expectation that a passenger will take over, but the cars operate only inside mapped service areas and conditions Waymo has approved.

No. The levels describe who is responsible for driving, not how well the system performs. A carefully limited Level 2 system and a Level 4 robotaxi are judged on different evidence.

That is the main lidar unit. It spins to sweep its laser beams around the vehicle several times a second, building a 360-degree, three-dimensional map of everything within a few hundred metres.

Lidar and radar do not need light at all, so a car with them sees as well at midnight as at noon. Camera-only systems depend on headlights and street lighting, like a human driver.

A single neural network that takes sensor input and produces driving commands, learned from data, instead of a chain of separate modules for perception, prediction and planning.

Planning typically runs about ten times a second, with the low-level controls that steer and brake running much faster. Sensors report at rates from ten to several hundred times a second depending on the type.

Because the car only operates on roads it has mapped and its operator has approved, and it has no driver to fall back on outside them. The service area is the boundary of its operational design domain.

Waymo has reported more than a hundred million miles of fully driverless operation, and far more in simulation. The number grows by millions a month as its services expand, so any figure is out of date quickly; its own safety-data pages carry the current one.

A trained employee behind the wheel of a test vehicle, hands near the wheel and foot near the brake, ready to take over. Most services begin with safety drivers and remove them only after testing shows the software handles the area alone.

Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent company, with outside investors as well. It grew out of the Google self-driving car project and became a separate company in 2016.

As of this writing, in metro Phoenix, San Francisco and parts of the Peninsula, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, through the Waymo One app or, in some cities, Uber. The list changes often; Waymo's own site has the current one.

Yes. Every Waymo vehicle carries lidar, cameras and radar, and the company has said it considers the redundancy essential to driving without a human fallback.

Not without supervision. Autopilot and FSD (Supervised) are Level 2 systems: the driver is responsible at all times. Tesla's separate robotaxi pilot in Austin runs without a driver in the driver seat but, as of its launch, with a Tesla safety monitor aboard.

Tesla argues that cameras and neural networks can match human vision at far lower cost and that lidar is a crutch. Most other developers disagree and use lidar, radar and cameras together. The dispute will be settled by safety records.

The California DMV suspended Cruise in October 2023 after a robotaxi dragged a pedestrian and the company did not show regulators the full video. Cruise halted operations nationwide, and in December 2024 General Motors ended its robotaxi business, saying scaling it would take too much money and time.

A human-driven car hit the pedestrian first and threw her into the Cruise vehicle's path. The Cruise then made the injury worse by attempting to pull over and dragging her, which is what the investigations focused on.

Amazon, which acquired the company in 2020 for a reported figure above a billion dollars.

Zoox certified its vehicle as meeting federal safety standards through alternative means, and it carries passengers under that certification. Regulators have questioned the approach, and the rules for purpose-built vehicles are still being written.

Yes. Aurora has run commercial freight between Dallas and Houston with no human aboard since May 2025, and Kodiak runs driverless trucks in Texas as well. Both operations are limited to specific routes and conditions.

Not soon, and not entirely. The first operations cover long highway segments between depots; the first and last miles, urban deliveries and anything off the main corridors still need a driver. Most forecasts see a change in the job before a fall in the number of them.

By fleet size and cities served, China and the United States are the two large markets, with Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide on one side and Waymo on the other. Exact fleet numbers change quickly and the companies count them differently.

In the areas where they operate, Waymo's published data shows substantially fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers on the same roads. The data is the company's, the miles are still limited, and other operators publish much less, so the general question is not settled.

The 2018 Uber test-vehicle crash in Tempe, Arizona killed a pedestrian, and several fatal crashes have involved Tesla Autopilot or FSD with a human driver responsible. No fully driverless robotaxi in commercial service had been found responsible for a fatality as of this writing.

No specific one. Federal rules govern the vehicle's safety equipment; whether it may drive without a human is decided state by state. Proposed federal frameworks have not passed Congress.

A 2021 NHTSA order requiring companies that make or operate automated driving or Level 2 systems to report crashes involving them, which created the first national record of such crashes.

Yes, two: a DMV deployment permit for the vehicles and a CPUC permit to carry passengers, with a separate tier for charging fares in driverless cars.

An annual filing California requires from companies testing with safety drivers, listing each time the human took over from the automated system. The numbers are not comparable across companies, which define takeovers differently.

Elaine Herzberg, struck by an Uber test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona on March 18, 2018, is generally counted as the first pedestrian killed by an automated test vehicle. Joshua Brown, who died in 2016 with Tesla Autopilot engaged, was the first driver killed with a driver-assistance system active.

No. Remote staff can answer the car's questions and suggest a route when it is stuck, but the car keeps control of steering and braking. Waymo and other operators say they do not drive vehicles remotely.

It stops safely and asks remote assistance for guidance. If that fails, a field team drives out to move it. Stuck vehicles blocking traffic were a major complaint in San Francisco and led operators to build direct lines to first responders.