After many false starts, abandoned investments and embarrassing setbacks, driverless vehicle technology is careening ahead at the fastest clip yet. 
Driverless semitrucks have traveled more than 1,000 miles hauling cargo between Dallas and Houston in Texas, with projections for rapid growth over the next decade.
Airline passengers who summon a Waymo from Sky Harbor in Phoenix don’t have to worry about making small talk or leaving a tip. Soon, the same could be said of Detroit, which Waymo said Nov. 3 it has earmarked as the first Midwestern city to expand its business.
Tesla Inc., on the precipice of an existential challenge with its robotaxi development, kicked off limited trials of its driverless service in June in its hometown of Austin, Texas, making that city the proving ground for its long-anticipated commercial autonomous vehicle launches.
In Michigan, you’ll also most likely see the building blocks of driverless vehicle technology, in some form or another, in consumer-owned vehicles on any road today ― even if the drivers in the next lane don’t have a clue. 
You’ve heard of lane keeping or blind spot monitoring? Maybe you’ve read about or tried hands-free driving in a Ford (BlueCruise) or a General Motors vehicle (Super Cruise).
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found the distinction between the levels of autonomy and automaker-named systems profound enough to publish resources with explanations about how these technologies work. Some driver assistance technologies, like lane departure and blind spot monitors, are designed to warn you if a driver risks an impending crash, while features like automatic emergency braking and blind spot intervention were designed to take action to avoid a crash altogether.
But when will drivers be able to safely take their hands and eyes off the road? Industry experts say that is coming soon.
For example, GM’s industry-leading SuperCruise is slated for a huge upgrade in 2028, which would make it among the first advanced driver-assistance systems in the U.S. considered a Level 3 system by the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Levels of Driving Automation. At Level 3, an automated system is entirely responsible for driving in select regions, but a human must be able to take over at the system’s request.
Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot system is considered Level 3 but is operational only at low speeds in two U.S. states.
Autonomous driving has glistened beyond the horizon for decades, with major automakers promising consumers a world where fleets of self-charging, self-driving electric vehicles would revolutionize how Americans get from Point A to Point B.
Technology companies and suppliers from Aptiv to Zoox have raised billions on the idea vehicles outfitted with the right tools and a smart computer could save lives (as many as 39,345 died from motor vehicle crashes in 2024, according to NHTSA) liberate the licenseless and shrink acres of asphalt devoted to parking legions of vehicles.
Overall, automakers and others believe these changes would usher in a transportation renaissance as transformative as the horseless carriage.
Today, the unmanned vehicles circulating on American highways and side streets are a fraction of what executives promised in the giddy early days of the technology’s development.
Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, referred to the city as “the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars,” comparing the site of Google-affiliated Waymo’s fully autonomous test drive in the city in 2015 years ago to the Wright brothers’ first controlled airplane flight in 1903.
“We are trying to do everything we can to help promote and advance the future of this technology,” Adler said. “We think it’s the wave of the future. We think it is going to help our city.”
Austin’s role as a hub for self-driving pilot programs happened, in part, because of the largely lax safety regulations in the city ― but lawmakers in the state are rethinking those policies.
Tesla’s fleet of 10 self-driving taxis took to Austin’s streets on June 22, the first time its cars carried paying passengers without human drivers and the move drew criticism.
A group of Democratic Texas lawmakers asked Tesla to delay its robotaxi launch until September, when a new autonomous-driving law was scheduled to take effect. The Austin-area lawmakers said in a letter that delaying the launch was “in the best interest of both public safety and building public trust in Tesla’s operations.”
Driverless vehicles remain far from ubiquitous, and consumer confidence in sliding into the backseat of an empty car remains shaky. 
The accident, experts say, could have something to do with that. 
Which one? Take your pick.
In case you missed it: Fully autonomous cars won’t be common until after 2035, experts say
There’s the 2018 incident when a self-driving Volvo X90 Uber killed a pedestrian in Arizona, after which the vehicle’s “safety driver” was charged with negligent homicide. (Safety drivers are humans in the driver’s seat who monitor the vehicle’s “behaviors” and intervene, when necessary, such as if the software or mechanical components fail.)
Or the unfortunate series of events that played out in October 2023 when a pedestrian, struck by a human-helmed vehicle, was forced into the path of a General Motors-owned Cruise self-driving car in San Francisco. The vehicle dragged the pedestrian 20 feet, resulting in critical injuries and setting off a media firestorm that prompted the subsidiary to halt all services and recall its fleet. 
Despite assurances and reports that vehicles outfitted with autonomous-enabling technology drive better than most humans, self-driving car crashes continue to draw national headlines. 
No vehicle currently available for sale is fully automated or “self-driving,” and the handful of legacy automakers that successfully produced systems are still only semi-autonomous, meaning responsibility always remains with the driver when it comes to operating the vehicle. 
Reams of regulatory red tape that manufacturers have to cut through to get self-driving vehicles on the roads have further slowed ramp up. And then there are those who ask: “Why would anyone need this technology anyway?”
Major automakers and tech firms called on President Donald Trump’s administration in March to implement a national performance-based framework for testing and getting such vehicles on the road and asked the NHTSA to function as the sole regulator of self-driving-vehicle hardware, software and operation. Weeks later, the administration responded through a pledge to exempt automakers from certain safety requirements and eased rules requiring those companies to report safety incidents. 
Automakers seeking to deploy self-driving vehicles have said self-driving vehicles should be exempt from having to have components that are needed for human drivers ― things like steering wheels, brake pedals or mirrors. NHTSA has authority to grant petitions to allow up to 2,500 vehicles per manufacturer yearly to operate on U.S. roads without required human controls, but the agency has spent years reviewing several exemption petitions without taking action.
That decision was “unequivocally good,” according to John Bozzella, president and CEO for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, who said it would ensure the United States doesn’t “cede AV leadership to China and other countries.”
“That this is among the first policy announcements from … the new team at NHTSA is a signal that AV policy in America isn’t an afterthought anymore,” he said in a statement. “This technology works. It will help improve safety on the roads and increase mobility. But the ability of AV developers, investors, automakers and consumers to reach their full potential has been hamstrung by government inaction.”
The order preserves several previous rules that manufacturers and operators of advanced driver assist systems must abide by, such as the five-day time limit on when to report crashes that involve any fatality, hospital transport, strike on a pedestrian or cyclist, or air-bag deployment. But critics of the policy change argue removing certain details from accident reports that were previously required ― like the version of automated self-driving software that was in use at the time of a crash ― may hamper the public’s ability to assess the technology’s danger.
Certain approaches to deregulate self-driving technology testing may benefit automakers as they continue to develop these technologies, but efforts made by the Trump administration do not appear to directly impact a speedier launch, according to Jennifer Dukarski, an automotive technology attorney based in Ann Arbor. Streamlining safety exemptions may get more products on the road for testing quicker, but the process will still require the normal development and validation non-autonomous vehicles require.
“Some of the reporting could be minimized, but that is merely providing the government with information and not a practical change to spur innovation,” she said. “Likewise, deregulating the little regulations that exist might not lead to the stability that many manufacturers and suppliers are craving. It’s the uncertainty that often drives decision making for these companies and eliminating regulations doesn’t necessarily provide that level of needed clarity.”
Most legacy automakers in the space had to alter course on how to put self-driving vehicles on the road. Late last year, General Motors decided to pull out of self-driving robotaxi development, citing considerable time and resources needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market. Instead, GM chose to acquire Cruise and consolidate the self-driving company’s people and technology into existing GM technical teams to work on advancing autonomous and assisted driving in personal cars. 
Despite major pivots in GM’s approach to autonomous technology, momentum has never been stronger, according to Adam Rodriguez, executive director of product and advanced driver-assistance systems at General Motors, who came to GM from Waymo last fall. 
“It feels like, as an industry, we’re at this inflection point where we’re so close to this magical world of autonomy that has been promised for the past few decades,” he told the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in March. “People said that we would have self-driving cars back in the early 2000s. Now we’re in 2025, we still don’t actually have them except in very limited spaces.”
Automakers largely have produced Level 2 systems, such as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and Ford’s BlueCruise, which is generally considered partial automation. That means the vehicle can steer and control speed on marked roads, but the driver must supervise and take back control when prompted.
Ford Motor Co. also changed tact in 2022 with its partner, ArgoAI, on which it relied for autonomous commercial vehicle development. Most of those employees were consolidated into the automaker to form Ford Latitude, a subsidiary with 550 employees.
BlueCruise is available across five Ford vehicle lines — Ford Expedition, Ford Explorer, Ford F-150, Ford F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E — and the entire Lincoln lineup, according to Adam Ginsburgh, general manager of BlueCruise.
“In the future, we believe the technology can have a profound impact on customers, as it may allow drivers to take their eyes off the road under certain conditions,” Ginsburgh said. 
More than 1,500 Waymo robotaxis operate today in sunny states, providing more than 250,000 rides per week. This summer, Waymo expanded into Atlanta, its fifth major U.S. city. Just like in Austin, Waymo offers service via the Uber app. In addition to Detroit, Waymo said Nov. 3 it plans to expand to Las Vegas and San Diego.
Michigan startup May Mobility launched a pilot program in Atlanta on Sept. 10 with Lyft, the first public launch of their partnership.
Eyes-off driving is just around the corner for most of the industry, Rodriguez, of GM, said, as technology advancements have largely improved the systems over time. 
“The industry is close ― we recently announced eyes-off driving coming to the 2028 Escalade IQ,” he said. “There’s a lot of momentum in that space, and GM is well-positioned.”
Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Reach her at jcharniga@freepress.com.

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