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Tesla

Every autonomous vehicle programme eventually reaches the same fork: the point where a technology that has worked convincingly in a limited pilot has to prove it can work everywhere, all the time, without a safety driver quietly correcting for the cases nobody designed for. Tesla’s robotaxi effort is now approaching that fork, and the coverage of it has tended to conflate two very different achievements — getting a service running, and getting it to scale.

• Regulators in different jurisdictions apply materially different standards for what counts as adequate evidence of safety before permitting driverless operation without a safety monitor.
• Expansion into new cities and states generally requires separate approval processes, each with its own timeline and evidentiary bar.
• Any serious incident during early scaling tends to trigger a broader regulatory review than the incident itself would strictly warrant, because regulators are conscious of setting precedent.
• Insurance frameworks for driverless commercial passenger services are still relatively immature, which affects the economics of expansion independent of the technology itself.