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

Chinese company Neolix has deployed over 10,000 autonomous driverless freight-delivery RoboVans with 1,200 in the city of Qingdao alone. They’re now the first company ever to have 10K driverless vehicles on the road (America’s Waymo just crossed 2K). Neolix is rapidly deploying in more cities and countries, and the RoboVans are reportedly now 20-30% cheaper than most commercial vehicles! Neolix claims that their factory in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province is now the world’s first mass manufacturing line producing Level 4 autonomous vehicles, and that they can now build 2,000 units per month. Of course, these RoboVans are fully electric as well.

Self-driving vehicles are now advancing very rapidly in China, with a fast-growing list of companies now operating thousands of robotaxis and robovans in dozens of cities.

As of November 2025, the U.S. currently has just one company, Waymo, offering paid driverless car rides. That’s a smaller field than in China, but it’s growing fast: Waymo has a fleet of 2,500 robotaxis (all of them electric!) and is expanding into more cities. Waymo ridership in California recently grew eightfold in one year, from 500,000 passenger miles driven per month in May 2024 to over 4 million miles in May 2025.

But concerning signs are emerging that electric urban mobility could become another fast-advancing technical domain where America unnecessarily holds itself back. An anti-Waymo cryptocurrency “memecoin” has grown rapidly in San Francisco, despite widespread concern that it’s likely a scam. When Waymo recently tried to expand to Boston, it was met with substantial local political opposition — despite increasing evidence that its electric self-driving cars are a big improvement on the status quo of roads dominated by fossil-fueled behemoths. Major insurer SwissRe has 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 claims than human drivers.

Waymo calculates that they prevent over 315 tons of carbon dioxide emissions with every 250,000 Waymo trips (so about every week) and reports that 36% of their riders in San Francisco have used Waymo to access public transit like BART or CalTrain.

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.  The inherent time-use efficiency of these new methods of electric driverless transportation means that they might also be able to reduce air pollution, reduce the total number of cars needed, and open more city area 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.

And the field is likely to diversify substantially. Volkswagen is planning to roll out anew fully autonomous ID.Buzz EV that comes with 13 cameras, 9 lidars, and 5 radars. 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!

City leaders should help advance cleaner and safer transportation by proactively welcoming 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 city leaders to support the deployment of electric self-driving cars!