Why it’s so hard to deploy AVs at airports

Bellowing law enforcement officers; impatient, inattentive, and incompetent drivers; inexplicable lane closures; travel-weary pedestrians, laden with literal and figurative baggage, wandering into traffic: These are just a few of the mainstays of the airport pickup and drop-off experience.

Robotaxi companies are eager to help you avoid asking your loved ones to experience this on your behalf. But first, they need to learn how to get to the airport.

“The appeal, of course, is that there’s a huge amount of rides,” Edwin Olson, CEO and founder of AV tech company May Mobility, which has partnerships with Lyft and Uber, told us.

“There’s a lot of miles, and the challenge is that you’ve got a couple of things working against you from a technology perspective,” he said. “You end up with a lot of chaos, like travelers bumbling around the pickup-drop-off location.”

Revenue opportunity: The reason AV companies want to get into the airport ride business is obvious: It’s a massive market. Even as far back as 2018, nearly four in 10 air travelers reported using ride-sharing, according to an HNTB survey. Lyft noted in 2025 that 61% of its riders have used the platform to book airport trips. And, Olson explained, it would be an efficient way to improve the financial proposition of autonomous ride-hailing by boosting utilization rates.

“If a significant fraction of rides are airport rides, then that creates a natural pressure that if you want to be able to put more vehicles into a market, you’re going to have to start taking those airport rides at some point. So it’s really a matter of, how do you grow your SAM to be a larger portion of the TAM?” he said, referencing serviceable addressable market and total addressable market.

“You can grow without airport trips, but eventually you’re going to need to be able to handle airport trips.”

Airport trips also tend to be longer, Paul Miller, principal analyst at Forrester, noted, and therefore bring in higher rates (looking at you, $100 trip to LaGuardia).

“You will have someone in the cab to the airport, and also someone there in the cab from the airport,” he added. “So it’s a good way to make money if you’re running a fleet of taxis.”

Taking off: In the US, Alphabet-owned Waymo kicked off service to and from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona a few years ago. Since then, it’s been a slow progression.

In September, Waymo announced it would be expanding its ride-hailing service to two California airports: San Francisco International and San Jose Mineta International.

“From freeways to airports, we look forward to continuing to help riders get where they need to go,” the company said in a December blog post. “Airports are a top destination, as we’ve seen with our years of successful operations at Phoenix Sky Harbor International.” Waymo recently started offering autonomous rides to employees (its typical practice before rolling out service to the general public) at Miami International Airport, “with plans to go fully autonomous at other major airports soon.”

Tesla leaders, too, want to launch airport robotaxi services in San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, California, Politico reported in September, and have initiated discussions with airport officials to start the necessary approval processes.

Roadblocks: However, there are considerable challenges standing in the way of widespread robotaxi use at airports.

The most significant barrier, in Olson’s view, is that airport rides require robotaxis to have the ability to travel at highway speeds, which is a work in progress for the AV sector.

“Freeway segments require the vehicle to be able to see much farther, which typically comes with a higher bill of materials price for the vehicle, and also just amplifies all of the risk,” Olson said. “The faster you go, the more likely it is that if something does go wrong, that you’re going to have a really bad day…These are all very solvable problems, and I think we’re all eager to get into the airport business.”

Getting to the airport is just the first of many challenges. Navigating airport campuses is even trickier.

“The roads are narrow and twisting, and there are things coming from left and from right,” Miller said. “There are people stopping at all sorts of bizarre times. I’m trying to get someone on a flight. I’m stopping here. I don’t care about the double yellow lines. I don’t care about that police officer walking toward me.”

That’s not all. Telecommunications traffic could jam vehicles’ GPS systems or interfere with various sensors, Miller said. Airports have heightened security requirements. “Security services tend to overreact to things in airports for very understandable reasons,” he added. “So you’re just adding complexity with the robotaxi.”

And, he noted, many airport parking lots and garages require a driver to take a ticket and then use the ticket to pay on their way out. “How does a robotaxi do that? You would have to change the physical infrastructure to have tags and sensors and things like that to allow the taxi to operate in that space.”

To make it feasible for robotaxis to operate at airports on a wide scale, Miller said that significant work will likely be needed, including building out infrastructure that can communicate with vehicles, updating lane markings, creating new ways to enforce traffic laws, and establishing dedicated robotaxi pickup and dropoff points. Finally, he noted, there are permitting requirements that companies have to go through in order to operate at airports.

Despite these barriers, Miller expects driverless taxi services to make it happen: “They all want to get it done, but they’re not going to rush it.”