Would anyone want to buy a car that drives itself?

Earlier this year, a mysterious new company called Tensor announced itself to the world by claiming that it would be the first company to sell fully self-driving vehicles to customers on a large scale. The news didn’t make much news. No one had ever heard of Tensor, so it was easy to dismiss this type of advertising as steamware. But the idea was not unfamiliar. In fact, some of the world’s largest companies are interested in selling self-driving cars to individual customers. After all, if you can already have a fully self-driving car, why wouldn’t you have one too?

But it won’t be easy. The technological and legal hurdles are enormous. Today’s robotaxis are restricted in where they can travel and under what conditions; It is unclear whether people would accept similar restrictions on the car they own. And accidents like Driving through an active police scene like Waymo recently didit becomes even more worrying when it is a privately owned vehicle.

But for companies investing hundreds of billions of dollars in this technology, it was always inevitable that a robotic bot would be just the beginning.

For years, experts have rejected the idea of ​​privately owned self-driving vehicles, arguing that the technology is too expensive for private sales. Instead, fleet-owned taxis were the safest bet, helping defray the costs of all the high-powered sensors and computing — said to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — needed to enable the cars to drive themselves. But the costs of much of this equipment, including lidar, are now coming down, resurfacing the idea that self-driving vehicles could be cheap enough to sell to ordinary people.

There is a growing list of companies that support the sale of fully autonomous vehicles, including… Waymo, Tesla, clearand GM. Even small players like Tensor, which was It spun out of former robotics player AutoX in Chinatrying to grab a piece of this undefined market.

It may eventually be possible, but will it be practical? An autonomous vehicle has different requirements than a conventional one, with countless sensors that need to be cleaned and calibrated almost daily. Will the owner be up to the task?

Some companies are working on self-cleaning sensors. Waymo, for example, has small spaces that keep its lidar sensors clean of dirt and debris. Tesla said it is working on robotic vacuum cleaners to keep its interiors clean. But neither company specified how ordinary people would be expected to maintain their privately owned automated vehicles — if it came to that.

Phil Koopman, an autonomous vehicle expert at Carnegie Mellon University, hypothesized that privately owned self-driving cars might work similarly to fractional aircraft ownership, where you could buy your own plane but still hand it over to a management company that handles maintenance and operational logistics. The idea is that you can “own” a driverless car while outsourcing almost all responsibility to third-party specialists.

“All the sensors would have to be calibrated, probably every day,” Koopman said. “But these sensors are pretty weird. I doubt you could run them for five years without needing maintenance.”

Another consideration: Most self-driving vehicles are pretty ugly. They require multiple sensors to recognize the world around them, and serve as backup sensors in case any of them fail. The result is a car decorated with a variety of sensors, which can make the car look unattractive, said Omar David Kilaf, CEO of Lidar Innovis. Aesthetics play a crucial role in the type of car people tend to buy.

“Ugly cars don’t sell, no matter what features they offer,” Kilaf said.

This has long been Elon Musk’s beef with lidar. He has argued that laser sensors are too expensive and too noisy to be used in personally owned vehicles. Tesla only uses the camera system for its Level 2 partially self-driving products, including full self-driving, which Musk has promised will eventually lead to fully self-driving vehicles. But this decision also led to multiple delays in Tesla’s plans to sell self-driving vehicles to its customers.

This may be a temporary problem. The next generation of lidar is significantly smaller and cheaper than previous versions, opening new opportunities for discreet mounting locations that don’t disrupt the vehicle’s appearance, Kilaf said. Fewer sensors will also be key to making the car more palatable to ordinary people. Many sensor companies, including Innoviz, are working to reduce the number required to enable greater levels of automation.

If you read between the lines, you can already see how some companies promoting the idea of ​​privately owned autonomous vehicles are allowing themselves enough wiggle room, in case the technology doesn’t work out.

For example, both Tensor and Lucid said they would sell vehicles that are defined as Level 4, meaning they can operate without any human intervention, but only under specific conditions. This may mean that certain geographic areas, such as places without specific road signs and signals, may be off-limits. It may also mean that the car will not be able to handle certain weather conditions, such as rain or a snowstorm. In those cases, control may need to shift to the human driver.

It is unclear how these restrictions will be received by consumers. While Waymo remains popular in the few markets it operates in, and Tesla still has its fans, Surveys have found Most people are still very skeptical about self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, advanced driver assistance features are still niche and have not yet become mainstream. Perhaps the auto industry is too far removed from its customer base.

This pressure is coming from new American startups, such as Waymo, and global competitors, especially Chinese automakers that are investing heavily in AI-driven vehicles, said Steve Mann, global director of industrial and automotive market research at Bloomberg Intelligence. Mann said automakers typically position autonomy not just as a business competition, but as part of a broader geopolitical contest over AI leadership. They feel they must invest in autonomy — even without certainty about consumer demand — because falling behind the curve could ultimately put them out of business.

Whether people actually want to own a self-driving car seems beside the point. After all, car companies have been immersed in the idea of ​​privately owned self-driving vehicles for more than 50 years. Take this video from 1956produced by General Motors, depicts a family of four driving around in a self-driving sedan covered in bubbles in the distant, distant future of 1976.

“Ah, that’s life,” Dad says after stowing the steering wheel away. “Safe, cool, comfortable.”

This is an idea that has long permeated the mythmaking of the American auto industry, and is likely to continue, even if this promise turns out to be nothing more than a fantasy.