Introduction
Many of us have been following the emergence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) via industry reports and YouTube videos for some years. We have watched how AVs have been evolving in both China and the US. From my perspective, I’ve been amazed at how AV progress has suddenly accelerated in the past couple of years.
In September 2025, with Tesla’s release of its FSD (Full Self-Driving (Supervised)) software, we were at last able to get a hands-on AV experience. In saying that, I recognise that ADAS systems, essentially involving adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping, have been in widespread use in Australia for some time. However, Tesla FSD goes much further and takes the car to a level which appears to be just one step away from being totally ‘driverless’ (for all types of roads – including both highway and urban).
I was very encouraged to see the growing interest in AVs on display at the Melbourne Everything Electric Show in November last year. For three days people were lining up to get an FSD experience – it appeared to be one of the most popular features of the event.
In the past few years, as the imperatives of AV adoption have increasingly dawned on me, I feel that I have moved on from being a casual AV observer to a real convert.
Personal Story
We received our FSD download on our Tesla Model 3 in September 2025 as part of its Australia wide release. We have essentially used the software every time we’ve taken our car on the road since then. It is important to note that the FSD system currently available in Australia requires constant supervision from the driver. It does make mistakes (generally related to navigation and the reading of road signs) – if anything goes wrong the driver is responsible.
Our longest FSD journey so far was from Canberra to Melbourne and back, to attend the November 2025 AEVA AGM and the Everything Electric Show. To all intents and purposes, it was a ‘hands-off’, ‘driverless’, journey. Having said that, while I rarely needed to touch the steering wheel or the brake, as ‘the supervisor’ I felt totally engaged. I was still driving but using a very different technique to one I’ve been using for the past 60 years.
Without getting bogged down in detail, FSD (supervised) is remarkably good. In fact, it is so confidence inspiring that we’ve now reached the point where we feel much safer if we are using it. This sense is hard to capture in words, but to me using FSD feels like the car is still being driven by a human, but a human with special powers. Using its 360 degree vision and amazingly fast reaction times, it seems to confidently take instantaneous decisions about how to blend in with the traffic around it. There are many videos on YouTube which demonstrate how it works.
This confidence is also underpinned by the fact that my car doesn’t get tired or distracted and have medical episodes like humans.
Safety is the main driver for us using FSD. After having had about 6 months of FSD experience I can now see how AVs could very significantly reduce our national road toll. In my view Australia’s road toll of around 1,300 people killed (+ many more injured) per year is a national tragedy. Why do we as a society simply seem to accept this horrible outcome as the natural collateral damage of moving ourselves around?
When I was a young child, my father was killed in a road accident. Based on my FSD experience, I’m very confident that his accident would likely not have happened if the truck that knocked him off his bike had been an AV.
Why do we need AVs?
Improved Safety
Building on my personal story, I believe safety has to be the main driver for AV adoption right across our road transport system. Over the past six months I have discussed the advent of AVs with many people and have read innumerable articles and Facebook posts about the issue. It seems to me that interest in autonomous cars has primarily been low to date because people can’t yet see the need for AVs.
I find that typically people think they are ‘good drivers’ and ‘the accident’ won’t happen to them. They don’t need to be ‘nannied by a car’. Sadly, I think you’ll find that this attitude is essentially hubris.
Accident analysis shows that about 90% of road accidents in Australia involve human error. Unfortunately, many ‘good drivers’ get killed by mistakes made by other drivers.
My FSD experience to date has given me great confidence that we can now more or less eliminate road trauma in Australia if we are prepared to work on AV adoption. [Recognizing of course there will always be ‘acts of God’, such as trees falling on cars, that will cause fatal road accidents.]
Economic Imperatives
This is a huge topic worthy of further papers, but consider for example: once vehicles can freely operate without a driver (we’re now very close to this point) we will not need to dedicate so much land in our cities to parking vehicles; we can address the chronic driver shortages that plague both long haul and ‘last mile’ delivery operators and we can provide personal freedom for drivers with disabilities.
There will be less need for individuals to own personal vehicles since ‘robotaxis’ should be able to provide quick-response low-cost transport in a city to fill in the gaps not covered by mass transit.
Where are we at with AV adoption?
It seems to me that at the moment there is low public awareness about the tidal wave of AVs that is heading toward us. But as far as I can tell AVs are coming, and they are coming fast.
Autonomous vehicles are now operating on public roads in other countries in the form of robotaxis or driverless taxis.
I am aware of robotaxis operating routinely in some of the major cities in China and the US. I have read of projected robotaxi fleets beginning operations in Japan, Singapore and London this year. Even Sydney gets a 2026 start-up mention in some robotaxi dispatches.
Putting aside media speculation, I’m finding it fascinating to watch the ramp-up of robotaxis in the US. Three main companies appear to be leading the charge – Waymo (a Google spinoff); Zoox (Amazon owned); and Tesla. A US community website, Robotaxi Tracker, has been set up to let the public follow what is happening (screenshot below).
At the present time, Waymo has the most vehicles on the road in the most cities while Zoox is only operating in Las Vegas. The robotaxis from both of these companies have no ‘safety driver’ in the vehicle. Tesla is currently operating robotaxis in the SF Bay Area and Austin – most of these have a ‘safety driver’ but a small number operating in Austin are totally autonomous.
At the end of January Tesla announced that it is planning a capital expenditure of $20B in 2026 on the AI side of its business (robotaxis, cybercabs, humanoid robots, etc). The first of its non-prototype ‘cybercabs’ (a vehicle with no pedals and steering wheel, destined for high volume production) came off the production line in mid-February 2026. [Picture below sourced from Tesla].
Where are we heading?
In my view we have a moral obligation to reduce the number of people killed and injured on our roads. Autonomous vehicles provide us with the tool to achieve this.
To me the way ahead is clear. Firstly, we have to demonstrate that AVs are significantly safer than ‘driver controlled’ vehicles. We can start by actively supporting the introduction of robotaxis in all of our major cities. These vehicles can provide us with an enormous amount of data to assess the safety case.
Once it is widely accepted that AVs are safer, we will have to make some hard decisions. In particular, how much safer do AVs need to be before we start phasing out the use of conventional vehicles on our roads?
I fully recognise that removing brake pedals, accelerators and steering wheels from our private vehicles would challenge many people. Nevertheless, requiring all vehicles on the road to be AVs would not restrict our mobility and/or our choices about where we travel – it would simply impose changes to the way we control our vehicles (an evolution that has now been going on for over a hundred years as technology has progressively improved).
It would take a brave politician to oppose removing pedals and steering wheels from our cars if this step would save thousands of lives.
Watch this space.