Nevada, prepare for robotaxis.
The Nevada Transportation Authority on Thursday unanimously approved three permits that will allow Tesla, Uber and Waymo to operate commercial robotaxi services in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. Together, these permits would deploy up to 8,000 robotaxis across the county over the next 12 months.
Tesla’s permit allows it to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis, while Waymo is allowed to operate up to 1,000 autonomous vehicles over the next year. Uber also received approval for 1,000 robotaxis, which it will operate through partnerships with Hyundai subsidiary Motional and Zoox. Zoox already holds an autonomous vehicle network company permit that allows it to operate 100 robotaxis.
Whether these companies will be able to launch so many robotaxis is an unanswered question. Testimony from representatives of Tesla and other companies suggests the answer is no.
“5,000 has always been a limit for us,” Eric Early, Tesla’s Cybercab chief engineer, said during the meeting. “I don’t think that at this time next year we will be in a position to deploy 5,000 vehicles, and it is not [because of] the technology. … I think we would be extremely happy and satisfied if we could get to 2,500, maybe a little more than that next year.”
Even if these three companies deploy only half of those totals, Clark County, and Las Vegas specifically, is shaping up to be a major robotaxi battleground, with Tesla, Uber (through its autonomous vehicle partners Motional and Zoox) and Waymo competing for the same passengers.
That kind of rapid, large-scale deployment of robotaxi is poised to change the city and, specifically, its workforce. Depending on who you ask, these companies will either offer a whole new category of jobs designed to maintain, charge, and clean these vehicles or they will eliminate an entire category of workers: human taxi drivers and gig drivers.
Representatives from the Livery Operators Association and local taxi companies opposed the permits, arguing that the approvals go too far, too fast.
“These applications raise two serious concerns,” Kimberly Maxson-Rushton, an attorney representing the Livery Operators Association, said at the hearing. “This is about oversaturation of the commercial transportation industry as a whole in Nevada,” he said. “And the second is about the saturation of the roads, and specifically the Golden Triangle.”
The Golden Triangle, an area between the airport and Las Vegas Boulevard and surrounding areas, is where the majority of AV testing has taken place to date. Motional is also conducting tests in the city center and in a commercial district known as Town Square.
Uber has tried to position itself as the Goldilocks option in this fight, advocating a hybrid approach in which transportation networks are made up of humans and robotaxis. The company even pushed for a system That would require robotaxis to operate on a ride-sharing network that also uses human drivers, a stance that puts it at odds with Waymo and also serves as a hedge against its own autonomous ambitions falling short of those of Tesla or Waymo.
Uber made a similar pitch during the NTA meeting, noting that a hybrid approach would allow cities to gradually integrate vehicles to meet peak demand rather than flooding the market all at once.
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