Finding
Autonomy worked first where the domain is fenced, and robotaxis are only now catching up with the mines
Driverless haul trucks have run in open-pit mines since Komatsu's first commercial system in 2008; by mid-2025 there were 3,832 of them, roughly as many vehicles as Waymo runs today. Mines, container terminals and warehouses went driverless first because the operator controls the site: who enters, the speeds, the routes and the weather exposure. Public streets are the hardest domain, and robotaxis reached real scale only in 2025-26.
That order still holds. A geofenced robotaxi zone is a fenced domain drawn on a public map; Waymo's 15 cities, Tesla's Austin service and Baidu Apollo Go's 27 cities all run inside mapped and approved areas. The same sensing, compute and planning stack runs across all of them; what changes is how much of the world the operator can bound. China and the US share the lead: Waymo has the largest robotaxi fleet, while Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide together run more vehicles in more cities, and China leads in mine autonomy and automated container terminals.
Texas is the main US proving ground: Waymo, Tesla and Zoox all run robotaxis there and Aurora runs driverless trucks (AustinIO tracks the Texas deployments). For the operating side, see Autonomous Fleets.
In this hub
Autonomy pages
| Group | Pages | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Frameworks | Autonomy Levels, Autonomy at Scale, Six Foundation Domains | Who drives, what limits scale, what an autonomous site depends on |
| Vehicles | Autonomous Cars, Robotaxi Fleets | Personally owned automation and robotaxi services |
| Sensors and compute | Autonomy Stack, Sensor Fusion, Cameras, Radar, LiDAR, Compute, Training Clusters | How the machine sees, decides and learns |
| Autonomous sites | Factories, Mines, Seaports, Logistics Hubs, Airports, Fleet Depots | Bounded sites where autonomy and electrification meet |
By domain
Autonomy maturity by domain
Maturity is an ElectronsX assessment.
| Domain | Driverless since | Scale | Maturity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mines | Since 2008 | 3,832 haul trucks (July 2025) | Very high |
| Container terminals | Since 1993 (Rotterdam) | 76 automated terminals | High |
| Warehouses | Since 2012 (Kiva) | Amazon alone 1M+ robots | Very high |
| Robotaxis | Paid driverless since 2020 (Phoenix) | ~10,000 vehicles across leading operators | Scaling |
| Highway trucks | Driverless since 2025 (Texas) | Hundreds | Early |
| Personal cars | L3 in narrow conditions | Unsupervised not yet sold | Early |
Sources
Sources and scope
- Scope
- Autonomous vehicles, robots and sites
- Sources
- Waymo; GlobalData Mining Intelligence Center; Pony.ai and WeRide filings (2026); TxDMV via texasavtracker.com; Zoox; Komatsu; port automation inventory (2025); AustinIO
- Updated
- October 2026