Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, Airbnb takes a giant step toward an IPO, and Elon Musk thinks he's got a very good chance of traveling to Mars and then dying there.

But first, the rise of self-driving cars.

So let's start here.

I'm a believer, a believer that hopefully in my lifetime,

cars will take us where we want to go

without ever having to press a pedal or steer a wheel.

And in fact, I'm not even sure that my daughter,

who's currently just eight years old,

will necessarily even take a driver's test,

or at least not one that anyone

today recognizes. And I also believe this is all a positive advancement, as tens of thousands

of Americans are killed each year in car crashes, most of which are caused by human error.

Autonomous vehicles should, at worst, significantly reduce the number of deaths, or at best almost eliminate them

entirely. The big question, though, is what happens as we try to get from here to there?

Autonomous vehicles simply aren't ready for prime time yet, no matter how many of them might

be tooling around the streets of cities like San Francisco, and there are going to be some big

challenges along the way. Everything from labor dislocations,

as drivers lose their livelihoods, costly changes to transportation infrastructure, particularly

inside of cities, and that very awkward period when self-driving cars and human operating cars

coexist on the same roads. So in short, there is no clear path to self-driving, even as companies from Detroit to Silicon

Valley are racing full speed ahead. In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper on this with Axios Autonomous

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