Rethinking Autonomy

Welcome to Smart Mobility Spotlight, Imagry’s newsletter delivering the latest in autonomous driving and smart mobility solutions. Subscribe to stay informed with curated insights, expert perspectives, and emerging trends in the ever-evolving world of transportation.

From Single Riders to Shared Impact

Across major cities, autonomous robotaxi services have moved from pilot projects to everyday reality. Operators now complete hundreds of thousands of driverless trips each week in cities such as San Francisco, Phoenix, Wuhan, and Dubai, with Waymo alone reporting more than 250,000 paid weekly rides by early 2025. Yet despite this rapid scale and impressive engineering progress, emerging data reveals a more complex picture about the role robotaxis play in addressing city level mobility needs.

Recent analysis based on the California Public Utilities Commission Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service quarterly data shows a clear pattern of low robotaxi occupancy. Independent review of Q3 2025 trip data indicates that the vast majority of robotaxi trips carry only one or two passengers, with a significant share operating with a single passenger or none at all. Zero occupancy trips appear when vehicles travel empty to reposition or reach the next rider, magnifying total vehicle miles traveled.

When combined with on demand routing and varied trip patterns, this model often results in large multi-ton vehicles serving trips that resemble private car usage, rather than shared mobility. This gap between the promise of autonomy and the realities of low occupancy travel raises an important question for cities, transit agencies, and mobility operators: if current robotaxi models are not delivering the efficiency or sustainability outcomes that urban networks require, what kind of autonomy can?

The Growing Gap: Why Low Occupancy Robotaxis Cannot Meet Urban Mobility Needs

A Smart Cities Dive analysis points to growing concern among transportation researchers that the current robotaxi model may increase rather than reduce system wide inefficiency. Robotaxis occupy urban road space like any other car and often rely on repositioning trips that add empty miles to the network. These movements, combined with the ease and convenience of autonomous travel, are expected to accelerate total vehicle miles traveled.

A 2025 systematic review published on MDPI reinforces this pattern. The analysis of more than one hundred studies on shared autonomous vehicles found that unless fleets maintain occupancy above fifty percent, their net impact on congestion and emissions can become negative. In several dense urban simulations, even fully utilized shared AV fleets increased total vehicle miles traveled by up to nine percent.

Taken together, these findings point to a structural issue. Robotaxis are fundamentally optimized for individual convenience rather than passenger density. Without strong incentives or coordinated pooling strategies, autonomous fleets tend to mirror the travel patterns of ride hailing, resulting in more vehicles on the road and fewer riders per vehicle. As a result, low occupancy robotaxis struggle to deliver the network level efficiency that congested cities need.

This raises a central question for planners and mobility operators: if robotaxis are built around single passenger travel, what form of autonomy can actually improve capacity and reduce total vehicle demand?

Why Shared Autonomous Transit is the Future

Autonomy designed for public mobility does more than remove the driver. It reshapes the transportation network around predictable routing, higher passenger capacity, and more effective use of existing infrastructure. Public transit-oriented autonomy is built to deliver greater value per vehicle mile.

Research published in Sustainable Mobility and Transportation points toward a fundamentally different direction for autonomous mobility. The study demonstrates what becomes possible when autonomy is designed for shared movement from the get-go. The researchers explore a hyper-pooling system that groups eight to fourteen passengers across overlapping routes. When tested on real world travel data from Amsterdam, this shared model produced a substantial reduction in total vehicle kilometers. When pooling was properly incentivized, the system even outperformed conventional public transit on cost and convenience.

The takeaway is clear. High efficiency outcomes emerge not from incremental improvements to robotaxis, but from building autonomous systems around passenger density, coordinated routing, and shared capacity. This is the direction that allows autonomy to enhance, rather than undermine, the goals of public transportation networks.

Imagry’s Approach: Autonomy Built for Shared Mobility

At Imagry Autonomous Buses, we believe scalable autonomy must serve cities, not only individuals. Our HD mapless autonomous driving platform is built specifically for shared transit deployments. This design approach supports the outcomes cities care about: higher occupancy, predictable operations, and mobility that delivers more value per mile.

Imagry’s system offers several key advantages for transit agencies and fleet operators:

• No special infrastructure requirements. Our AI-based approach removes the need for LiDAR, HD-maps, and specialized roads. This makes deployment faster, more flexible, and well suited to dynamic transit environments.
• Share-ready from day one. The technology is optimized for predictable, high frequency operations, making it ideal for shuttles, microtransit, fixed route services, and other shared mobility formats.
• 1/3 the cost of many AV alternatives. At roughly $70K per roboshuttle vehicle, Imagry is significantly more cost-effective than other options (which exceed $200K per vehicle), leading to real world scalability for public fleets.
• White label flexibility. Imagry’s solution is fully brand agnostic. Transit agencies and operators can deploy autonomous services under their own brand while relying on Imagry’s technology stack.

Autonomous Mobility Video Spotlight

While the robotaxi market has focused on novelty and individual convenience, the real transformation will come from autonomy that supports density, equity, and sustainable city operations. Imagry’s platform is built for that future, where autonomous vehicles move more people, more efficiently, and strengthen the role of public transportation in growing urban regions.

These days, robotaxis are featured in most articles about autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, autonomous buses are also transforming how we move people through public transit. Imagry CEO Eran Ofir was recently invited by PAVE (Partners for Autonomous Vehicle Education) to join a virtual panel to discuss the current state of automated transit.

Watch the recorded session: https://imagry.co/news-events/how-automation-is-advancing-public-transportation/

Autonomous Mobility News & Events

Click here to see the latest news and events featuring Imagry’s autonomous driving solutions.

Autonomous Mobility Career Opportunities

We’re building more than autonomy. We’re building a team that dares to do what others say is impossible.

We value people who chase hard problems not credit. Who ask better questions. Who stay curious. Who care about the mission, not job titles. And we know that to build the future, we need all kinds of minds.

If that sounds like you, we’d love to meet you.

See our open positions here.

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