While Volkswagen’s ex-CEO was of the opinion that Level 3 self-driving needs radar equipment, contrary to Elon Musk’s opinion it can be done with Tesla Vision cameras only, its successor now says that autonomous Volkswagens will be a common sight in 2030. Sitting down for an interview, Mr. Thomas Schaffer added that the company’s expensive testing vehicles are scouring the streets of Munich and Hamburg right now and there will be a commercial autonomous ride-hailing fleet of VW ID Buzz electric cars there by 2025…

In the meantime, all that computing power needed to provide the complex calculations of the raw input coming from its sensory sidekicks will turn electric cars into “the biggest data collection device there is.” While that might sound scary for the privacy-minded, Germany has one of the strictest security safeguards, too, and that’s one of the reasons the legislation around autonomous driving is so complex to navigate: