The company's robotaxi service is supposed to launch in the US capital this year. But while service rollouts have been relatively smooth in other cities, DC's rules have made things tricky. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops self-driving vehicle tech, has picked up speed. The company now operates robotaxis in six cities and has announced plans to launch in a dozen others this year. It j ust raised $16 billion in a new round of funding and says it has served over 20 million rides since the company launched its service in 2020, 14 million of them in 2025 alone.

As it turns out, making cars drive themselves may have been the easy part. The hard part is yet to come. Over the past few days, the Financial Times has detailed in two reports how the autonomous vehicle businesses of Silicon Valley are beginning to reckon with a new issue: being functioning businesses. I understand this must be a new and troubling development for any Silicon Valley startup, but here, it sounds like a profound wakeup call. Increasingly, industry insiders recognise that commercialising their technologies may be more difficult than anticipated -- due to questions around "government approval, public trust, brand marketing, the ability to manufacture at scale and the technical knowhow to manage a fleet that competes with the likes of Uber and Lyft on timely pick-ups", Patrick McGee reports in his weekend Big Read.

The governments of most countries around the world are willing, if not necessarily eager, to aid in the development of advanced-level assisted driving. Yet, India is not'most countries'. In mid-2017, the country's transportation minister Nitin Gadkari said bluntly that his government "will not allow driverless cars in India." Why? "We are not going to promote any technology or policy that will render people jobless." This categorically states the government's worry.

It's 2018, and Waymo is doing it live. Two months after the Alphabet self-driving car spinoff announced it would start running a truly driver-free service in Phoenix this year (as in, cars romping about with no one at the wheel), the company now unveils how it will do it: with the help of thousands more Chrysler Pacifica hybrids. The vehicles, built by Fiat Chrysler in Canada, will eventually make their way to the cities where Waymo is currently testing driverless tech. Waymo already uses 600 of the minivans to test its driverless software. The details are a bit sketchy.

Recently, BMW mentioned that it would introduce an autonomous car by 2021, called the iNext. The automaker hasn't released much detail about the vehicle, but it will most likely resemble the similar-sounding Vision Next 100 concept vehicle, which the company showed off back in March. At BMW's annual shareholder meeting this month, the company's CEO, Harald Krueger, said, "Our goal is already clearly defined -- to be number one in autonomous driving." But BMW will find plenty of driverless-car competition among its fellow luxury automakers, most specifically from Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler. Daimler is currently a leader in driverless technology among automakers, and it's likely Krueger's mention of autonomous tech is an effort to reassure investors the German automaker isn't falling behind one of its biggest rivals. But which carmaker is leading in driverless tech?