THE DEBATE AROUND self-driving cars tends to generate a fair bit of attention. Depending on who you ask, the technology is either the near certain future of transport or an overblown Silicon Valley fantasy that will fall apart on a narrow rural road in Ireland.

As ever, the reality is more complicated.

With Tesla pushing to secure approval for its Full Self Driving (FSD) software across Europe, the question has become more immediate for Irish drivers.

What “self-driving” means in practice

This is where much of the confusion begins.

There is no single thing called a self-driving car. Engineers refer to a scale from Level 0 to Level 5, and almost everything on the road today sits at Level 1 or 2.

At Level 2, a car can steer, accelerate and brake under certain conditions, but the driver remains legally responsible and must stay attentive.

A browse of DoneDeal Cars turns up thousands of vehicles with lane assist, adaptive cruise control or automatic emergency braking: all Level 2 features, all requiring an attentive driver behind the wheel.

Tesla’s FSD, BMW’s Highway Assistant and Mercedes’s various systems sit at the same level. For now, Tesla is the only one that has been sold in Ireland, though FSD has not been activated here. Not yet anyway. But that could change in the not-too-distant future.

A truly driverless car, where you could have a nap or read a book, would be Level 4 or 5.

No car company currently sells one to the public anywhere in the world. The closest you can get is a Waymo robotaxi in a handful of American cities, which operates without a human driver but only within zones that have been........

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