Autonomous Vehicles: The Outlook for 2025Autonomous Vehicles: The Outlook for 2025

If there has been one constant in the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry over the past decade, it is that expecting the unexpected has largely been a wise move.

The market has been littered with twists and turns: regular missed deadlines on delivery of much hyped solutions, the dramatic emergence of new technologies and, as General Motors’ decision to pull the plug on funding its Cruise self-driving taxi subsidiary at the end of 2025 demonstrated, sudden pivots in strategy

The AV sector has seen it all, ensuring that looking ahead with any confidence can be a challenge in the best of times.

Entering 2025, this uncertainty is still in evidence, and in the United States is arguably exacerbated by the imminent return to the White House of Donald Trump, a president who seems to thrive on unpredictability.

The current thinking is that Trump, encouraged by new ‘first buddy’ Tesla CEO Elon Musk, may look to ease federal regulations on self-driving cars.

Any legislation that makes it easier for more AVs to hit the road in the U.S. will certainly come at an opportune time for Musk, whose company is likely to spend 2025 fine-tuning the Cybercab it revealed in October as it prepares to enter the self-driving taxi market. 

Testing of the autonomous technology that could drive Tesla’s production robotaxi is apparently already under way in San Francisco, with Musk stating: “We think that we’ll be able to have driverless Teslas doing paid rides sometime next year,”referring to 2025.

Musk has also said he would be shocked if Tesla’s unsupervised Full Self Driving technology does not get regulatory approval in the next year, which would help facilitate a robotaxi roll-out. However, given his history of broken promises on autonomous driving, it might be wise not to pin too much faith on that.

What is indisputable is that Tesla’s high-profile soft launch of the Cybercab and Cruise’s demise have increased the focus on the entire self-driving taxi sector, shining the spotlight brighter than ever on a number of already active operators that are keen to make more progress in 2025. 

Leading the way is Waymo, which has already announced plans to launch in Miami, a new city, in 2025, as well as offer its self-driving taxis exclusively on Uber in Austin and Atlanta.

Given its impressive scaling in 2024 – by December it was delivering 150,000 paid trips a week across the U.S. – it is a safe bet that more cities will be added to its roster over the next 12 months, and the number of weekly rides delivered should increase significantly.

As the partnership with Uber shows, self-driving taxis are becoming a more common presence on ride-hailing platforms. Lyft has also signaled its intent to offer riders this option, while Estonia’s Bolt, which is big in Europe, recently outlined its plans to do so.

Of course, one of the side-effects of the likely continued scaling for Waymo is increased confidence among the general public in self-driving technology, which in the U.S., based on a recent American Automobile Association survey, remains low. 

That should be to the benefit of rival companies and May Mobility and Amazon’s Zoox in particular look set to continue their upward trajectory. 

Although it differs from Waymo in offering AVs on fixed routes and is a much smaller operation, Michigan’s May Mobility is steadily adding to its U.S. deployments, two of them driverless, and will be launching in Japan with its Multi-Policy Decision Making technology fitted to a new vehicle, the Toyota e-Palette.  The steady progress it has shown in the last couple of years is likely to be maintained.

The profile of Amazon-backed Zoox, meanwhile, is set to soar with its extraordinary, purpose-built AV, which does not feature a steering wheel or other traditional driving controls, scheduled to hit the streets of San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Of the Western companies active in the self-driving arena, one other name to look out for is the U.K.’s well-funded Wayve. With increased use of AI becoming ever more integral, it has eight years of pioneering research to lean on and recently started testing in San Francisco.

Further afield, there is expected to be high interest in Chinese robotaxi companies’ efforts to branch out beyond their homeland. With Baidu already approved to test in Hong Kong and WeRide launching via Uber in Abu Dhabi, the starting pistol has been fired on the race to dominate autonomous ride-hailing services globally.

While the self-driving taxi industry may dominate the headlines, the implementation of automated technology in passenger cars by OEMs continues, but not at a convincing pace. 

General Motors CEO Mary Barra justified the ending of the Cruise self-driving taxi experiment by explaining that it would pivot to further developing its hands-off Super Cruise tech for privately owned cars.

The reality for GM, which is facing huge problems in China, where it is restructuring, and the wider industry as a whole is that priorities lie elsewhere, with a major focus on shifting electric vehicles that, thus far, there has been insufficient demand for globally.

In an environment where senior industry executives are losing their jobs, factories are closing and the very survival of some manufacturers is being questioned, it is no surprise that developing autonomous technology, which is costly and complicated, is taking a back seat.

In that landscape, no one is likely to overtake market leader Mercedes, whose Level 3 ‘hands-off’ Driver Pilot technology is expected to be evolved further in 2025, operating at higher speeds than before and on more cars in the line-up.

Among autonomous trucks, meanwhile, have had a ramp-up in driverless testing in the U.S. in 2024. That should continue, with the goal of commercial driverless operations edging ever closer for a small cluster of companies in 2025.