What Are The Milestones Of Robotaxi Service?

More than a score of companies are pushing to be early winners in the race for self-driving taxis — robotaxis — with the potential that brings to capture the entire value chain of car transport from your riders. They are all at different stages, and they almost all want to convince the public and investors that they are far along.

To really know how far along a project is, you need the chance to look inside it. To see the data only insiders see on just how well their vehicle is performing, as well as what it can and can’t do. Most teams want to keep those inside details secret, though in time they will need to reveal them to convince the public, and eventually regulators that they are ready to deploy.

Because they keep them secret, those of us looking in from the outside can only scrape for clues. The biggest clues come when they reach certain milestones, and when they take risks which tell us their own internal math has said it’s OK to take that risk. Most teams announce successes and release videos of drives, but these offer us only limited information because they can be cherry picked. The best indicators are what they do, not what they say.

As such, I enumerate below a list of milestones I look for to show progress for a team. These are roughly ordered, but some teams will do them in different orders, and will definitely do them differently in one city than another, based on the challenges of driving in each region.

1. Collect underpants. (Do the basics on test tracks and quiet roads.)
2. Ready to operate on public roads with 2 safety drivers
3. Production of decent length video of an incident free drive
4. Willingness to take press and other outsiders for a ride
5. Report on incident statistics over lots of miles
6. Operation of safety-driver based robotaxi service for outsiders
7. Long video of incident free drive not chosen by team. (ie. pre-announced and livestream of a route randomly chosen from a very wide set of choices.)
8. Take safety driver out of driver’s seat (but still in car)
9. Robotaxi service with safety driver out of driver’s seat but still in car
10. Totally vacant test operations on easy roads, with employees as pure passengers
11. Vacant operations with full time remote monitors
12. Detailed safety reports on extensive operations, externally audited
13. Reduce remote monitoring to a level that scales (for example one monitor for 10 active taxis or better.)
14. Test robotaxi operations with selected beta testers under NDA
15. Polish robotaxi functionality (Pick-up/Drop-off, user experience.)
16. Remove NDA
17. Expand robotaxi operations to general public, for free
18. Expand robotaxi operations and charge a competitive fee
19. Expand service area, operating hours, etc.
20. Commercially viable service on a COGS basis
21. Commercially viable service including reasonable allocation for non-recurring expenses (like R&D)
22. Profit!

Most teams are not that far on this list. Waymo is at #18 in Chandler, but not there in SF. Cruise is at #10. AutoX is probably furthest along in China. Tesla TSLA -1.2% is around #4 but is not really working too hard on robotaxi functionality, taking a private-car-first approach but definitely planning taxi operations. These milestones are not at all evenly spaced, and they are done at different speeds in different territories. Some require legal clearance, particularly charging money and totally vacant operations.

Stay tuned to this document. It will get updated based on reader suggestions and new activity in the industry.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2021/12/08/what-are-the-milestones-of-robotaxi-service/?sh=206fe1425cec