Robotaxis may be arriving faster than our cities are ready for.

Several people asked me after my last post whether the autonomous vehicle I rode in Munich was actually driverless.

It wasn't. There was still a safety driver behind the wheel and the company is called Autobrains Technologies, who is supplying the technology - this time not a Chinese company.

That is not because the technology isn't ready. The vehicle had only been converted about ONE week before I drove it and is currently being parameterised. That process will continue for another week or so before it could technically operate without a driver. Whether it actually does so is another matter, because today the bigger questions are no longer only technical.

What struck me most after the ride was how much the discussion has shifted. For years autonomous driving was presented as a technology problem. We talked about sensors, computing power, high-definition maps and edge cases. All of those remain important, but they no longer seem to be the whole story.

The harder questions are increasingly operational.

How do cities integrate autonomous vehicles into existing traffic? How do they interact with buses, bicycles and pedestrians? Where do they stop? Who cleans them? Who intervenes when something unexpected happens?

That is why robotaxis are such an interesting starting point. They operate in a defined area, with a fleet operator behind them and clear procedures when something goes wrong. It is a much more manageable environment than expecting privately owned autonomous cars to appear everywhere at once.

Only a few days after my ride, Landeshauptstadt München decided to increase the minimum fares for Uber in an effort to reduce competition with traditional taxis. It made me wonder how cities will react when the discussion shifts from ride-hailing to vehicles that no longer need a driver at all.

It suddenly feels as if robotaxis are no longer a distant vision. The technology is arriving faster than many people expected.

The real question may be whether our institutions can keep up.