Tell your state leaders to support the deployment of electric self-driving cars!

Volkswagen has partnered with Uber on plans to roll out all-electric autonomous taxis in Los Angeles with a full fleet available by 2026, forming a new contender in the competitive field of “robotaxi” efforts. Volkswagen’s new fully autonomous ID.Buzz EV comes with 13 cameras, 9 lidars, and 5 radars, carries four passengers, and unlike its rivals it includes “Mobility as a Service” software that empowers anyone who buys it to immediately operate their own turnkey driverless-car business. The potential here is fascinating!

And there are many other self-driving car providers scaling up in the United States, from Google spinoff Waymo to Amazon’s Zoox. Waymo is already delivering over 250,000 fully autonomous commercial robotaxi rides per week across the United States. Notably, Waymo has already launched a long-term partnership with Hyundai to build all-electric Ioniq robotaxis in Georgia.

Furthermore, all the available data indicates that Waymo’s self-driving cars are substantially safer than human drivers. The first 7.1 million Waymo miles driven in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix caused only 3 minor injuries compared to an expected 13 injuries for human drivers. Major insurer SwissRe calculated that Waymo’s self-driving cars (which don’t text, speed, drink, or get tired) have 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer injury damage claims than human drivers. Automotive deaths are one of the biggest killers of healthy people in developed countries (the NHTSA estimates that over 39,000 people died in car crashes in America in 2024), so it’s starting to look like quite a lot of lives could be saved by widespread self-driving car adoption!

Beyond the safety benefits, self-driving cars becoming widely available could also make it much easier to live without owning a car, as well as substantially increasing mobility options for senior citizens, disabled people, and older children. Although it’s hard to know the real-world effects in advance, their inherent time-use efficiency means that they might also be able to substantially reduce air pollution, reduce the total number of cars a population needs, and open more of cities to pedestrians, cyclists, and green spaces. A self-driving car can take someone to work and then drive other people around all day, making money for its owner, instead of sitting useless in a parking lot for hours, potentially meaning that we could end up with fewer total cars.

State leaders can help advance cleaner and safer transportation by proactively supporting self-driving cars (at least the models that have proven themselves to be safe and responsible) with supportive legal, regulatory, and permitting structures.

Tell your state leaders to support the deployment of electric self-driving cars!