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Every auto executive across the world must know now that their in a race to offer true door-to-door self-driving capability. While Elon Musk hyped up Tesla robotaxis a decade ago and expected to be a decade ahead of everyone with such capability, what we’re seeing is various automakers and self-driving technology companies getting better and better at driver-assist technologies and getting closer and closer to true self-driving. Eventually, it’s going to be expected that one’s car can drive a person to where they want to go. They won’t be waiting on a robotaxi to come pick them up; their own car in their garage will be their chaffeur.
Of course, there’s plenty of debate about how far away we are from this, but BYD has basically started to offer it, and there are many Tesla FSD users who have to pay attention all the time (at least legally) but who are letting their cars driving them 99% of the time. With this in mind, every automaker needs to be adding capability ASAP.
The latest news on this front is Stellantis partnering with Wayve in order to offer hands-free, door-to-door, supervised automated driving. The press release calls this “Level 2++” — quite a funny/odd distinction. Well, the announcement came last month, but the capability is not coming until … 2028. Better late than never.
