2026 has been a major year in the autonomous vehicle industry. Tesla began operating its autonomous taxi business, Cybercab, in Austin, and Waymo, an Alphabet company, began accelerating its robotaxi expansion locally and internationally. CEO of Tesla Elon Musk has claimed that Tesla’s robotaxi business model will be a core value of the company. The reason why the autonomous driving industry is a main focus of tech companies is that a computer never gets tired, and without a paid driver it makes taxis and deliveries much cheaper. But how does a machine actually drive a car by itself? How would this technology affect our society as it expands?The idea of autonomous driving technology was envisioned in the 1920s, inspired by science fiction; its technological advancement began in the 1980s. Major automobile companies worked with college engineering and computer science departments to realize the design of autonomous vehicles, and in the mid-2010s, the partially automated driving system began to be released in consumer models. Tesla, one of the earliest companies to introduce partial automation, released its Autopilot system in 2014, which allowed cars to steer, accelerate, and brake while the driver stays alert, ready to take control. This kind of technology is measured using the SAE J3016 standard. It is a standard that ranks automation into six levels. Level 0 is the level where the human does all driving and Level 5 is where the car handles every task and does not require any human interaction. Most cars are at Level 2, where the car can control steering and speed but the driver must intervene. Waymo’s robotaxis are at Level 4, where the car can fully drive on its own under a defined condition, which is a mapped area. Level 5 does not exist yet.Autonomous vehicles utilize various combinations of sensors to perceive the world around them and decide which action to take. Cameras are used as eyes for the vehicles; they can detect signs and traffic lights, but they struggle to judge distances and have trouble in bad weather. LiDAR, short for Light Detection and Ranging, sends out lasers to construct a detailed 3d map of the car’s surroundings that includes precise depth and distance information. It measures the distance by multiplying the speed of light by the return time and dividing by two. LiDAR repeats the calculating process to build a detailed 3D map called a point cloud. Radar sends radio waves to detect the speed and position of objects near the vehicle using the Doppler effect. When a radio wave bounces off a moving car, its frequency slightly changes, and the shift reveals the speed of the car. Wei et al. (2025) compared the three sensors and found that cameras are cheap technology but showed poor performance in rain and fog. LiDAR is expensive and only showed medium performance in rain. Radar is a medium-cost technology but performs highly in rain, fog, and darkness. Because each sensor shows different performance in different situations, Waymo combines all three sensors in a process called sensor fusion which is a system that utilizes all sensors holistically.

Sensors are used to gather information from the environment and for the car to make decisions, it needs to go through 4 modules, which are sensing, perception, planning, and control. In perception, the car’s computer uses a neural network that mimics the function of the human brain. It learns from images of objects such as pedestrians and recognizes them. Then, it tries to predict where the object will move next like predicting whether the pedestrian would cross the street or not. In planning, it chooses the safest path and speed and in control, it converts that decision into commands by controlling steering, braking, and acceleration. Companies use different brains for their products. Tesla only uses cameras and an AI system that turns raw camera images directly into driving decisions. Waymo utilizes different sensors and detailed 3D maps. Tesla’s method is cheaper but critics argue that it has no backup sensor that works when cameras fail to function.

These technologies affect our society in various ways. The biggest potential benefit of the technology is safety. Kusano et al. (2025) studied 56.7 million miles driven by Waymo cars with no human driver controlling and found 55% fewer police-reported crashes and 80% fewer injury crashes than human drivers. Beyond safety issues, autonomous driving technology is expected to affect society in bigger ways. Self-driving cars can make transportation easy and accessible for elderly people or disabled people who are unable to drive themselves. However, self-driving vehicles can replace jobs. A report by the International Transport Forum estimated that over 2 million truck drivers in the US and Europe could be directly displaced by driverless trucks. Public trust is also low. A 2025 AAA survey found that 13% of U.S drivers would trust riding in an autonomous car while 6 out of 10 people are afraid to do so. Finally, when a self-driving car crashes, it is unclear who is responsible for the crash: a passenger or the company that manufactures cars. Awa et al. (2018) found that people’s opinions on how a car should act in an unavoidable crash differ across different cultures, showing that there is no single answer to how the program should act.

The mechanism of autonomous driving technologies combine sensors such as camera, LiDar, and radar that measure the world with programs that recognize objects, predict movements, plan the route, and control the car. This technology are expected to make reduce car accidents and make transportation more accessible for the people, but its downside would reduce many jobs and raise ethical concerns. As more companies race to expand their business, society needs to consider how to ensure the benefits the society gain from technological advancements while minimizing its risks.

Citations and Further Reading

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/03/business/tesla-robotaxi-cybercab-self-driving-carshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2026/09/03/tesla-cybercab-launches-with-closed-event-surprising-some-fans/https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/waymo-goes-on-offense-ahead-of-teslas-cybercab-launch/https://theweeklydriver.com/2026/07/robotaxi-wheelchair-accessibility-dc-bill/https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3016_202104https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21885https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.08467https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20892https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotaxihttps://doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2025.2499887https://www.itf-oecd.org/driverless-trucks-new-report-maps-out-global-action-driver-jobs-and-legal-issueshttps://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-vehicles-persists/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0637-6