2025-11-14T16:33:56.556Z
- Tesla’s former head of Autopilot believes self-driving cars will “terraform” urban spaces.
- Andrei Karpathy said robotaxis won’t happen “overnight,” but they will change the way we live.
- Karpathy is also the co-founder of OpenAI and coined the term “vibecoding.”
The computer scientists behind the term “vibecoding” are making bold predictions about the robotaxis revolution.
Andrei Karpathy, a founding engineer at OpenAI who previously led Tesla’s Autopilot team, said in a post on X on Thursday that while self-driving cars won’t become the norm “overnight,” he expects the technology will eventually change urban spaces forever.
“This is the first technology in decades to visibly terraform outdoor physical spaces and lifestyles,” said Karpathy, who will leave Tesla in 2022.
“There will be fewer parked cars and fewer parking lots. It will be much safer for people getting in and out of cars. There will be less noise pollution and more space will be freed up for humans,” he added.
Karpathy is also known for coining the term “vibecoding,” which was named 2025’s Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary this month.
He said he hopes self-driving cars will free up drivers’ time and “attention” from “lane following” and make the delivery of physical goods cheaper and faster.
His comments echo the predictions of other robotaxi enthusiasts. At Tesla’s CyberCab unveiling last October, Elon Musk showed a rendering of what urban space would look like after robotaxis and said the rise of self-driving cars would allow cities to turn parking lots into green spaces.
Musk has also touted Tesla’s fully self-driving car as a way to give drivers back some time. During Tesla’s recent earnings call, he said the ability to send text messages while the car is driving itself would be a “killer app” to stimulate demand for the CyberCab.
Texting while driving is illegal in nearly every state in the U.S., and robotaxis still have a ways to go before they can impact urban planning.
Tesla operates a robo-taxi service with a safety monitor in the passenger seat in Austin and a chauffeured FSD ride-hailing service in San Francisco, while Waymo offers driverless ride-hailing services in five major U.S. cities.
Both companies have ambitious expansion plans and are conducting tests across the U.S., but they face hurdles in a patchwork of robotaxi regulations, as rules governing self-driving cars are largely left to individual states.
