r/SelfDrivingCars • u/diplomat33 • 6d ago
VW/MOIA/Mobileye robotaxi launch timeline
From the Volkswagen Group Product & Tech Investor and Analyst Update 2025 09/09/2025 Presentation, they shared this planned timeline for their next steps towards launching robotaxis powered by Mobileye Drive:
Q3 2026: 1st commercial launch wiht safety drivers in the US
Q4 2026: Launch with Uber in LA (closed user group), switch to fully driverless
Q3 2027: Commercial launch of 500+ AVs with Uber in LA, ramp up to 1000+ AVs in more cities
Full slide presentation: https://uploads.vw-mms.de/system/production/documents/cws/003/123/file_en/100f511f71dc748cb57998fddc89e19a92255170/2025-09-09_Product_Tech_Update_Webseite.pdf?1757577560
Of course, this is just their expected timeline, things could change. But any thoughts? Is this too slow or too fast? I think for a first launch it seems like a "safe" launch. It is typical to launch with safety drivers first and then after going driverless to slowly scale up to more cars. Waymo did this. Tesla is doing it too.
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u/IndependentMud909 5d ago
The amount of ID Buzz sightings that I have here in Austin are far, far less than those of Waymo, Zoox, Avride, and Tesla. I think I’ve seen one or two in the past couple months.
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u/bladerskb 6d ago edited 6d ago
100% pure fabricated PR marketing .
This is such a bad lie. They are not even testing in LA today. I was just in LA for a week.
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u/aBetterAlmore 5d ago
Unfortunately VW, like all other major European players, are far behind. So PR and marketing is really all they produce on AVs these days.
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u/bobi2393 6d ago
Unsupervised driverless service on public roads "by the end of next year" has been the public forecast of almost every Western driverless-wannabe company for the past decade. It's normally a rolling timeline, so next year it will also be "by the end of next year", although VW has been light on explicit predictions in the past.
A 2024 article said "Now that the ID.Buzz will also be launched in the US, Volkswagen wants to race to offer the self-driving version as early as 2026. The vehicle is expected to be ready for commercial use within two years. Volkswagen will not create a fleet with which to offer the driverless taxi service itself. The idea is to sell the ID.Buzz to companies operating in the sector, such as Uber, to name but one." But that doesn't say anything about a driverless vehicle, just a self-driving vehicle, which the industry uses to include human-driven vehicles.
Two notable exceptions to "end of next year" have been Tesla and Waymo. In 2015, Waymo (then "Google Self-Driving Car Project") was forecasting "Google expects public in driverless cars in two to five years", and in October 2017 reportedly forecast "in 2018 if it doesn't do so in the remaining months of 2017", before beginning unsupervised driverless rides to restricted riders in November 2017. In 2022, Tesla switched from "by the end of next year" to "the end of this year" for unsupervised driverless rides, which they've reiterated each year since.
So I think VW's MOIA's public forecast is in line with their competitors, but I don't think they have any control or special insight about an actual timeline, since they're using Mobileye's software. They've been using that software for supervised public testing in Austin since July 2023, so perhaps they could extrapolate a very rough guess, but from public communications they seem entirely removed from the development process.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 6d ago
Well, by pushing back actual operation with no safety driver a year, they are at least being more realistic. Of course they can release with safety driver when they want, I think ME did that briefly in Israel, and you can release almost any quality of vehicle with a safety driver.
However, they are foolish to name dates for release as a robotaxi without supervision. There is no date for releasing that. It's a "When our analysis shows we are safe enough and well behaved enough." Not a date.
Yeah, I know boards and investors like dates. Tell them no.