Here's an unpopular take: the autonomous vehicle industry's relentless push to expand, approve, and deploy robotaxis as quickly as possible may be the exact wrong strategy for long-term success.
I say this as someone who sees the appeal of speed. Recent approvals like Waymo's expansion across California counties represent genuine technological achievement. The companies involved have invested billions. Shareholders are eager for returns. Cities want solutions to transportation problems. The momentum feels inevitable, even righteous.
But momentum and inevitability can be dangerous counselors.
The autonomous vehicle sector has spent years positioning itself as the inevitable future. The narrative goes: self-driving cars are coming, resistance is futile, and the only question is who gets there first. This mindset creates pressure to move faster, cut corners, and treat caution as weakness. It's the startup ethos transplanted into a domain where human safety and public trust aren't just nice-to-haves.
What concerns me isn't whether autonomous vehicles work in ideal conditions. They clearly do, at least in controlled environments and good weather. What concerns me is whether the industry is building the right foundation for genuine public adoption at scale.
Consider what's actually required for robotaxis to become truly mainstream. Not just legal approval. Not just technical deployment. But sustained public confidence across diverse neighborhoods, weather patterns, edge cases, and years of operation. That requires something the industry hasn't fully earned: the benefit of the doubt.
Trust, unlike approval, can't be rushed through regulatory processes. It accumulates through time, transparency, and honest reckoning with failures. Every incident in a robotaxi becomes a data point in the public mind. The industry's track record matters less than how it responds to problems, admits limitations, and demonstrates accountability.
The current expansion-at-all-costs approach risks creating incidents and controversies faster than the public can process them. When things go wrong (and they will), a pattern of "move fast and expand faster" can look like negligence rather than necessary risk-taking.
There's also the question of what gets built when speed is the primary metric. Are we designing systems that work everywhere, or systems that work in the best conditions while hoping bad conditions don't happen too often? Are we testing thoroughly in diverse environments, or deploying and learning from real-world incidents? These questions matter more than quarters.
The counterargument is obvious: restraint means delays, and delays mean competitors get ahead, which means the cautious company loses. This logic is compelling to shareholders and boards. But it assumes that moving first is the same as winning first, which isn't always true. Sometimes the company that moves second, after learning from the first company's mistakes and public backlash, ends up with better technology and stronger public trust.
The autonomous vehicle industry should ask itself what success actually looks like. Is it being the first to deploy robotaxis in 18 counties? Or is it building transportation infrastructure that Americans—across age groups, neighborhoods, and income levels—genuinely trust and depend on for decades?
Those are different goals, and they require different strategies.
I'm not arguing against autonomous vehicles. I'm arguing for clarity about what we're optimizing for. If we're optimizing purely for deployment speed, we'll get exactly that. If we're optimizing for sustainable public confidence and genuine safety, we need a different approach.
The robotaxi industry has earned the right to be bold. What it hasn't earned is the right to assume the public will keep pace with its expansion. Restraint isn't the opposite of innovation. Sometimes it's the prerequisite for it.