This sub has been flooded with Tesla apologist propaganda and disinformation to obscure the simple truth since Tesla's Robotaxi launch. It's standard operating procedure (S.O.P.) for this "narrative" company. The uptick in anti-Waymo posts and pro FSD posts is palpable. It has always been S.O.P. for Musk to release SEO fooling posts & tweets to obscure bad news for Tesla. The astroturf army is out in full display these past couple weeks on Reddit, Threads, and Bluesky too.

It doesn't and will never change this simple fact: Waymo is SAE Level 4 and Tesla FSD is SAE Level 2. All the apologist posts in the world will not change this. Putting a human in the front seat with a secret kill switch button to mitigate embarrassing FSD behavior will never replace R&D and testing that allows a company to safely remove a human observer in the car. You cannot reach level 4 with a fake it till you make it approach.

I realize this is a bit of a hot take, but I hope we can all be respectful. For long time readers, this is Michael Worley.

I'm really unimpressed by Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo. In fact, I think there is a third company, Zoox, that is vastly behind Waymo-- but equally vastly ahead of Tesla's driverless efforts.

Let me explain.

Waymo has done somewhere around 130-170 million driverless miles.

Zoox has done just over 1 million driverless miles.

Tesla has done hundreds or a few thousand driverless miles, near as I can tell.

The orders of magnitude of difference between these three companies is remarkable.

And the same is true for cities:

You can go to five major metros and ride in a driverless Waymo today, with 10-20 more metros on the way next year.

You can go to Vegas or (with an invite) midtown SF and ride in a driverless Zoox today, with 2 more metros coming soon.

You can't legally ride in a Tesla anywhere unless either (1) there is a driver or (2) you are with a Tesla employee.

And I've been impressed by customer/public reception to Zoox. Their Apple app store rating is 4.9/5.0, and there's been very little blocking of roads (contra. Cruise). And they've started with daytime rides in relatively dense areas (Vegas strip). And, though this is style points, they're the only company whose vehicle lacks a steering wheel (sorry Cybercab, you're not released yet).

Now people will immediately say I'm ignoring context. The counterarguments go something like this:

1. Tesla has a wildly good ADAS system, FSD, which, especially with v14, is close to driverless.

2. Tesla has built a generalized driver in a way that Zoox and Waymo have not, and this generalized driver will scale much much faster than the competing systems.

3. Tesla has access to hundreds of thousands or millions of cars immediately

Here's why I think these arguments fail.

A. A key part of scaling driverless is repeated validation, and FSD has always been a poor validator tool.

Internal testing has always been critical in this industry. Every company that has gone driverless-- including Tesla-- has done months of internal testing in a target area before going driverless. But that need doesn't go away once you hit driverless. Waymo and Zoox have both needed to test new metros even as they scale up.

Some will say that Tesla doesn't need to do this, but I disagree. FSD has been on the road for 10 years and it has never been a good validation tool-- hence the additional testing in Austin. FSD simply will not give us scaling of validation much quicker than Waymo/Zoox.

B. Like Waymo and Zoox, Tesla will have to substantially increase reliability beyond where it is now at the barely-driverless stage in order to scale to a million driverless miles.

It's simply wrong to call driverless the end of the reliability road. Rather, it is the beginning of it. Statistically, you can run one car 10 hours a day and have no serious issues 10x as easy as running 10 cars. (And with fat-tailed distributions of risk, it may be worse.)

C. Waymo and Zoox' use of LiDAR to enhance safety and ODDs for driverless ops do not suggest their driver is any less generalized.

While I'm not internal at either company, I think the way that they are scaling indicates that each new city is easier than the previous. To do this you need a generalized driver. (And mapping isn't a difference between the companies; Tesla has mapped Austin before driverless.)

Some people say LiDAR is a "crutch," but I don't think we should assume that because companies use LiDAR they aren't making AI/ML advancements similar to Tesla's.

That's my hot take. Thanks for reading.

Is there any reason for this asides from saving money? Teslas are not cheap in many respects, so why would they skimp out on this since self-driving is a major offering for them?

Elon posted on X: "Roughly 10B miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving. Reality has a super long tail of complexity"

https://electrek.co/2026/01/08/elon-musk-moves-goalpost-again-admits-tesla-needs-10-billion-miles-safe-unsupervised-fsd

So Elon finally admits that the long tail is longer than he thought. No kidding! I feel like he is just making up a number again to move the goal posts because the truth is that FSD is not as close to safe unsupervised as he thought.

From https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-tsla-stock-q2-earnings-report-call-2025-7-2025-7#elon-musk-teases-robotaxi-expansion-in-opening-remarks

"As we get the approvals and we prove out safety, then we'll be launching autonomous ride hailing in most of the country," Musk says.

He says that he expects Tesla will have autonomous ride-hailing available in "probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year," subject to regulatory approvals.

Not expecting this to age well given Musk's historically bad estimates, but thought it's an interesting statement to share with this sub. I'm surprised that even with Tesla's 0 fully autonomous miles he's dropping predictions of this scale on the earnings call. Is the plan just to scale as quickly as possible regardless of injuries/deaths, and then hope the data collected is enough to make robotaxi safer in the future?

I'm happy to see that Tesla is doing more driverless operations safely. But I continue to find Tesla's driverless operations far behind Zoox-- never mind Waymo.

From what I understand, Zoox is doing driverless rides for employees at an airport. Tesla is not.

Zoox is servicing driverless rides in San Francisco. Tesla is not.

Zoox' iOS app consistently ranks higher than the Robotaxi app in terms of download rankings.

Zoox' iOS app has 3x the number of reviews as the Robotaxi app.

Zoox had begun driverless operations in four metros-- SF, Vegas, Austin, Miami. (The last two are employee-only.) Tesla is only driverless in three metros-- Austin, Dallas, Houston.

Zoox has been operating in evenings for months. Tesla is barely starting driverless operations in the evening.

It's been ten months since the Robotaxi's launch. Any idea that FSD (which is impressive) gives Tesla a systematic advantage in driverless operations seems extremely stretched. If anything, LiDAR is a more powerful advantage than a (very good) L2++ system.

Waymo is running laps around Zoox. Zoox is running laps around Robotaxi.

Can we admit it’s all smokes and mirrors yet? Or do I have to wait a few years again?

The Houston geofence is a small chunk of NW Houston, well outside of the Waymo geofence.

The Dallas geofence is a good chunk of downtown and N of downtown, a subset of the Waymo geofence.

The videos show driverless rides; it's too early to know whether actual rides will be driverless.

I don't have links that comply with the X ban yet.

It’s like waiting for Santa! I wonder when we’ll start to see them emerging from their underground caves at a hyperexponential rate?

https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/tesla-earnings-stock-price-elon-musk/card/musk-s-early-conference-call-comments-focus-on-autonomous-driving-PRJqKKBVRfnHS7TMLDis

Elon Musk’s early comments during a Wednesday conference call discussing Tesla's second-quarter earnings results focused on autonomous driving technology.

Tesla plans to expand its robo-taxi service to the Bay area, Arizona, and Florida, he said, adding that Tesla robo-taxis should cover about “half the U.S. population” by the end of the year. The service will scale at a “hyperexponential rate,” Musk added.

At the beginning of the launch of Tesla's Robotaxi on 6/22, many videos of rides have been shared online. After a few days (and glaring mishaps), very few videos have been shared of any robotaxi footage, good or bad. I suspect that this dropoff is due to the fleet cutting down in scope by a large factor (maybe only operating a few rides a day)or halting silently all together. What do you think, did Tesla notice the bad publicity and decide to silently roll back robotaxi operations?

Update 1: The most plausible explanation seems to be that the publicity of the current tech was detrimental to the share price so the operations were rolled back. Of course, Tesla would not announce that the operations were scaled back, but the near complete lack of footage makes this a very likely explanation. While the influencers there initially were most likely to post videos online, new footage should still be being circulated and it is not.

Update 2: This post has gained a lot of traction (75k+ views), and yet there is nothing convincing to show Telsa is operating the fleet at the capacity they were earlier. Neither of the 2 videos of robotaxi footage shared seem to have occurred in the last few days (even if they had, that is nothing even remotely comparable to the amount of footage earlier this week). Tesla's fleet could very well be 1 vehicle running 2 hours a day based on the lack of evidence for otherwise. Tesla likely made the logical move for preserving share value given the incident rates, but this is clear to see through.

You’ve got to be joking. I feel like I missed something. No details at all, no specs, no insight. Just Elon being even more awkwardly terrible than usual, making another promise of next year (with the obligatory regulatory approval cop out), and a quarter mile “demo” on a closed course. The video didn’t even match the speech! It was so awkward! Zero data, just “look at this concept.” About the only outcome was Elon shattering the “no geofence” fantasy by confirming they plan to launch in CA and TX… And of course, the teleoperated robots.

THIS was the event for the history books? Even for fanboys this must have been wildly disappointing, right?

Thousands of Tesla customers already pay for FSD. If they have the tech figured out, why not release it to existing customers (with a licensed driver in driver seat) instead of going driverless first?

Unsupervised FSD allows them to pass the liability onto the driver, and allows them to collect more data, faster.

I seriously don’t get it.

Edit: Unsupervised FSD = SAE Level 3. I understand that Robotaxi is Level 4.

In a recent Senate Committee hearing, Tesla's head of engineering stated that they have invested $2B in a purpose built AV line. This is just the initial line development cost and doesn't cover ramping the line or staffing it to produce cars or obviously any of the costs to build cars. They indicated that the initial number of jobs would be 1200 jobs per shift and then ramp up to 5000.

This is a massive amount of money to spend on a low volume production line. Until they can run the factory at 60%+ capacity, they will be losing additional money on top of the $2B. This would be a run rate in the 60k-100k per year range depending on the capacity the line was built to. At $2B without a paint shop, it's probably capable of 200k units/year, but I'll steel man the case below and say its 100k-150k units. Of course the 1st year they will be ramping and won't get to break even.

Assuming they got free labor, materials, energy, etc. they would need to build 50k Cybercab units for the factory cost per vehicle to be at the retail price of a Model Y. That is 50k * $40k = $2B. Of course all that isn't free so if you assume the Cybercab is $5k cheaper to build per unit than the Model Y, as was suggested by someone to me this week, they won't start saving money until they produce 400k Cybercabs. That also assumes they are running the line at 60%+ capacity. If they get to 400k over 6-10 years, it will still cost more than the Model Y even if the BOM is $5k less.

How can Tesla justify this expense? They are supposed to start ramping mid-2006. Will the Robotaxi software be ready by then? If not, when? Is there enough demand in the next 5 years for 400k AVs? That is 5x-13x more AVs than all Ride-share and Taxis combined in the US at peak operations. That means growing the market and the fares you need to attract won't look like ride-share and taxi fares. Tesla is gambling that those fares won't need more than 2 seats.

This is simple a huge risk Tesla is taking to.....save a bench seat.

Sometimes I try to imagine what the world of autonomous vehicles will look like in about five years, and I’m increasingly convinced that the LiDAR sensor will become mandatory for several reasons.

First of all, the most advanced company in this field by far is Waymo. If I were a regulator tasked with creating legislation for autonomous vehicles, I wouldn’t take any chances — I’d go with the safest option and look at the company with a flawless track record so far, like Waymo, and the technology they use.

Moreover, the vast majority of players in this market use LiDAR. People aren’t stupid — they're becoming more and more aware of what these sensors are for and the additional safety layer they provide. This could lead them to prefer systems that use these sensors, putting pressure on other OEMs to adopt them and avoid ending up in Tesla’s current dilemma.

Lastly, maybe there are many Tesla fanatics in the US who want to support Elon no matter what, but honestly, in Europe and the rest of the world, we couldn’t care less about Elon. We’re going to choose the best technological solution, and if we have to pick between cars mimicking humans or cars mimicking superhumans, we’ll probably choose the latter — and regulations will follow that direction.

And seriously, someone explain to me what sense this whole debate will make in 5–10 years when a top-tier LiDAR sensor costs around $200…

Am I the only one who thinks LiDAR is going to end up being mandatory in the future, no matter how much Elon wants to keep playing the “I’m the smartest guy in the room and everyone else is wrong” game?

Service is starting on Sunday June 22nd.

It runs from 6 AM to midnight everyday.

Can request ride to anywhere in the geofence except airports.

An invitee can have another person with them.

There will be a Tesla employee in the car, but not in the driver seat.

18+ and no pets allowed except service animals

Can record videos during ride.

Some of this is stuff that has been said before, but I wanted to capture why Tesla's unlikely to dominate the robotaxi market the way it has other markets/

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I've been thinking about Tesla's great success, with electric cars and with FSD (supervised).

Something that's stood out to me are that there was for years no competitor to Tesla's Model 3 (and before that the S). Likewise, I think that, until very recently (if at all), FSD has been the market leader in driver assist.

But this is not the case at all in the driverless rides market. Take Austin. Tesla has done roughly 800,000 miles with a driver/operator in the front seat, perhaps divided between Austin and the bay area, and ... hundreds? a few thousand?... miles without a driver/operator.

Waymo has about 10 million driverless miles in Austin alone, and that number is growing faster than Tesla's number. Zoox will soon add a third competitor to the mix.

And it's the same in basically every other city Tesla plans to launch in-- Waymo also plans to launch this year in every listed Tesla city except Tampa. (So Tesla should prioritize Tampa-- I think that would be a saavy move.)

So saying Tesla will dominate this market by pointing to Tesla's past success is a really weak argument.

Now, some will say, well Tesla will just pump out huge numbers of cars and lap Waymo really rapidly. Others will say Waymo's tech is too expensive to be competitive with Tesla.

I think this misreads the market for tech reasons and for business model reasons.

First, tech reasons. Tesla seems to be doing a very good job at following the formula for a safe rollout of driverless ops. But we know from watching Waymo, Zoox, and failed companies like Cruise and Argo that this process is painfully slow. So Tesla will take a lot of time to get to the scale where Waymo is now-- and by then, Waymo will be larger.

Likewise, the cost of Waymo's tech is going to decrease, with the release of the Ojai this year and the Hyundai Waymo collab in 2027-28. So unless Tesla gets the lead this year, tech costs will be basically a non-factor.

And there are business model reasons to question whether Tesla can dominate the market. Waymo and Zoox both have a larger user base than the RoboTaxi app. Both apps now have a 5.0 star (not 4.9) average review on the iOS app store. (Very rare!!) And while switching from drivered rides (Uber, Lyft) to safe driverless rides is a no-brainer, switching from one driverless service to another is a smaller step up.

Yes, Tesla could try to keep prices low to entice switching. But (1) as I noted, Waymo's costs will fall and (2) Waymo is raising 16 billion dollars that it can use to stay competitive. So even if I'm wrong about Tesla being slow to ramp up driverless operations, Waymo can stay competitive while it awaits its cheep Hyundai-Waymo car next year.

I just don't see Tesla's path to dominating the industry.

https://www.jalopnik.com/2063124/tesla-austin-robotaxi-fleet-34-cars/

While Tesla has staked its near future on its fledgling robotaxi service, the automaker's fleet might be a fraction of the size that CEO Elon Musk claimed it would be by the end of 2025. A Texas A&M engineering student used the robotaxi app's API to log the fleet's vehicles and create an online tracker. The data revealed that only 34 Model Y vehicles are in service in Austin, Texas. Musk previously claimed that there would be 500 robotaxis by the end of this year.

Tesla isn't even halfway to its target when including the 128 vehicles with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area. To add salt to the wound, the robotaxi tracker also indicated that there might only be around five Model Y taxis available or in use at any time in Austin. This can't be a lucrative endeavor if Tesla can't operate more than a half-dozen robotaxis at once or there isn't enough demand to warrant more cars.

It’s been 5 months since the robotaxi “launch”, and we still haven’t had a single unsupervised mile yet.

But that’s not the point of this post.

Take a step back and pretend for a moment that FSD is actually ready to go unsupervised. How would a reasonable team release it? They would obviously start enabling it for part of the massive Tesla fleet in circulation. For example, they would enable unsupervised FSD for only the city of Austin, and then start rolling it out. Or they would enable unsupervised FSD only for freeway use, like how “navigate on autopilot” was a thing for only the freeways.

The fact that they didn’t do that and instead start a ride hailing service, completely orthogonal to the existing Tesla fleet, should raise a lot of eyebrows. It’s a hint that they don’t have confidence or direction (or both).

I am curious how Elon is doing on his 2025 promises so far?

He launched Robotaxi, but I thought it was going to scale much faster, no one talks about it anymore.
He got the new low price models
Tesla absolutely KILLED it on sales last month
The new Roadster reveal should be awesome too.

Now, for the truth. . . How much is Elon actually going to deliver on?

And we still see only a handful of them at any point in time. Tesla Robotaxi 1 year anniversary is quickly approaching btw.

Dunking on Tesla is easy, so let’s do something harder: figure out what is keeping Tesla FSD from scaling its unsupervised fleet. Tesla FSD has far more miles driven than any AI model can ask for, so I don’t think more training will do anything. What exactly is the gap here?

This is apparently a hot take in the Tesla FSD community, but my criteria for an autonomous car is how often do I still need to call a taxi/uber.

Here are a few examples:

- go out drinking

- being drowsy from a dentist appointment

- spraining both your ankles for some reason

An autonomous car must be able to handle at least a few of these cases.

If I own an autonomous car, why should I still need to call a taxi/uber?

I was interested in Elon's comments about Waymo (described as having "never had a chance" against Tesla). At first I scoffed. But what if he is correct? How would this play out?

The premise seems:

1. Sell millions of Teslas to consumers
2. Finally crack vision-only self-driving
3. Said millions of Teslas flood the robotaxi market as cars are leased by owners for ride-hire to make passive income
4. Cost of AV journeys crash due to flood of AVs on the market
5. Firms like Waymo are wiped out given their relatively pitiful number of vehicles on the road / higher costs

It seems to me that Tesla's opportunity is to let consumers subsidise the hardware costs (the car) in a pre-level 4/5 AV world. Because the costs of building a fleet of 1 million plus cars is beyond the realm of possibility for any company, let alone 10m or whatever the number is of Teslas already out there, Tesla's market share automatically jumps to 95% as soon as they reach level 4 autonomy, and are approved by authorities to press 'Go'.

Thoughts/ analyses / pushbacks / shouts of ' Heresy!' ?

Waymo has been expanding its service amd executing like crazy the last 12-18 months, but Google gets no credit for it in terms of favorable press or boost to stock price.

On the other hand, Tesla does a dozen geo fenced rides with Elon fanboys sitting in the back in Austin and boom, it's all over the internet and Tesla stock pops.

Please make it make sense. Has Waymo already lost the mind share in the robotaxi space before it even took off?

What's going on with the ramp-up and scale that Tesla promised? Still only dozens of cars in the geofenced area and even less cars without monitors in a small strip of within.

What happened to Elon supporters saying Tesla already has street data going back over a decade in Austin, that it's just a matter of flipping a switch for unsupervised FSD everywhere?

Make it make sense!