By Michael Sønderby, Acting CEO, SteerAI
Silicon Valley promises us a self-driving future, but there's a problem: their autonomous vehicles are built for perfect California highways. The world isn’t confined to roads, though—and even when the roads are perfect, conditions aren’t. Human drivers are the single most unpredictable factor in autonomous mobility, regardless of pristine road markings or GPS signals.
On-road autonomy isn’t about mastering road conditions. It’s about mastering people. Off-road autonomy, which is emerging as its own industry, is an entirely different beast: It’s about mastering physics and the natural environment.
Some of the most valuable autonomous applications happen off-road, where the luxuries of maps, GPS, and road markings don't exist: logistics in harsh climates, off-road operations, military deployments, and emergency response.
This is where the UAE's approach to autonomous technology becomes instructive and why the region is positioned to help lead the next phase of the autonomous revolution.
The perfect conditions fallacy
Autonomous vehicle development often assumes ideal operating conditions: clearly marked routes, consistent GNSS coverage, high-definition maps, and predictable terrain and weather patterns. But real-world deployment is far more complex than on-road autonomy suggests. Autonomous vehicles need to get off the street and into nature.
Consider the operational realities facing organizations operating in the Middle East. Commercial logistics face extreme heat, sandstorms that reduce visibility, and fast-changing port and industrial environments. In addition to these conditions, defense, security, and emergency response operations also contend with remote, unmapped terrain and GNSS-degraded or denied environments.
Together, commercial logistics, defense, and emergency response operations support and protect total GCC trade flows projected to reach $2.3 trillion by 2033, underscoring why reliability in extreme conditions has real economic and strategic importance.
Where others can't go
In the GCC, autonomous technology development cannot follow the same playbook as Silicon Valley or European urban pilots. Here, we’re seeing autonomous systems being embedded into smart city blueprints and strategic transport plans as part of broader visions like UAE Vision 2071 and Saudi Vision 2030.
To successfully create an autonomous industry, we need systems developed for local realities. Local technology capacity will further propel the region to global leadership as it develops vehicles that are designed for the Gulf’s extreme heat and vast desert expanses. Battery and thermal systems, for example, require robust cooling architectures to maintain performance in temperatures that frequently exceed 45°C, a challenge that AV platforms must actively manage through advanced thermal control. Solving this at the system level creates an opportunity for the region to develop autonomous platforms that are exportable to extreme environments globally.
Dubai's Autonomous Transportation Strategy aims to make 25% of trips autonomous by 2030, while Abu Dhabi is scaling autonomous vehicle operations under its broader smart mobility and AT Vision 2040 framework. While these targets focus primarily on on-road passenger transport, they signal something broader: a regulatory environment, public-sector commitment, and deployment mindset. Together, these indicators create the conditions to scale higher-value autonomous applications beyond the road, including off-road logistics, industrial operations, and defense.
Strategic advantage
Autonomy can significantly reduce operational costs by limiting downtime, cutting reliance on scarce skilled labor, and enabling round-the-clock operations in conditions that would otherwise halt human activity. It can improve safety by removing people from high-risk scenarios such as extreme heat, hazardous terrain, or contested or infrastructure-degraded environments. And it allows organizations to scale faster, deploying systems consistently across sites without the constraints of human endurance or availability.
When these capabilities are built locally—engineered from the outset for extreme heat, unreliable connectivity, and off-road conditions—they create technologies that are not only resilient in the Gulf, but also globally competitive in any environment where failure is not an option.
The next phase
The autonomous revolution's next phase won't be won by companies that perfect highway driving in perfect conditions. It will be led by organizations that solve autonomous operations where others can't go.
The UAE's investment in extreme-environment autonomous technology isn't just about regional competitive advantage. Through initiatives such as SAVI, Abu Dhabi’s Smart and Autonomous Vehicle Industry cluster, the country is building the infrastructure, testing environments, and industrial partnerships needed to develop the capabilities that will ultimately define autonomous systems globally. When the rest of the world needs autonomous technology that works anywhere, in any condition, they'll turn to solutions proven in the desert.
The companies building these solutions today will lead tomorrow’s autonomous market. The defining challenge ahead is not whether autonomous systems can navigate public roads, but whether they can operate off-road and beyond the public realm—without lanes, signals, reliable connectivity, or supporting infrastructure. While a small number of global players are investing in this space, the UAE’s advantage lies in its ability to combine real-world environments with a coordinated national ecosystem designed to deploy these systems at scale.
This is innovation at the extremes, and the world should be watching.
Read the full feature in Al-Jundi here: https://online.fliphtml5.com/dqxyz/owqp/#p=18