this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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look, i don't like tesla either, but assuming a linear progression here is probably really naive and wrong. they know how to scale up, once their tech is on point, look at the rate falcon 9s deliver starlink sats in LEO.
The thing is that waymo did this without decades of training data arriving per day. Tesla is worryingly far behind on the actual self-driving tech from an investor's perspective.
If anyone is still invested in Tesla at this point, they deserve to lose their shi(r)t.
Now if they're newly invested, that may be another story entirely. Assuming the battery & solar biz doesn't get spun off.
Except they didn't. Self-driving is effectively nonexistent for both companies
I was actually surprised that Waymo had only thousands of units in operation.
That being said, 3,000 commercially operating for years with zero fatalities, that's not nothing. It's not a ton, it doesn't change the world (much), but it isn't zero. Tesla's result so far rounds down to zero.
There's also tons of incidents of Waymo robo-taxis speeding through school zones, turning the wrong way onto one-way streets, and stopping in the middle of the road obstructing traffic. And this is carefully curated sections of cities that they are contained in.
The lack of fatalities seems to be in spite of Waymo, not because of
They constantly need manual corrections by humans remoting in, much like with Tesla. So downvote me all you want, it doesn't change the fact that both companies can't achieve what they claim.
I mean, there are traffic violations, and then there are traffic violations - if there's a dead body at the end, it was the second type.
Neither is desirable, but it would actually be a big win to create a tech system that drives a car that produces fewer fatalities per mile than the average human, regardless of whether or not it generates speeding tickets or other inconveniences.
That's my opinion, anyway. I won't downvote you, I only downvote comments unhelpful to the overall conversation, you're not being unhelpful, I just disagree with you.
Speeding increases the distances needed to stop. That's really important in school zones, where there's kids crossing the street. Not only that, Waymo's cars can't identify school buses that are stopped to pick up and drop off students and tend to drive right past them.
The only reason they haven't killed any kids yet is because they're kept in small areas of cities away from schools. If you don't believe me, here's a video covering it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcq0tjmvGOs
And focusing on developing self-driving cars as robotaxis is silly when there's a way better solution: re-zoning cities to make them more walkable and building more publiv transport. Removing cars from cities is way safer, and reduces issues like congestion and noise pollution.
And then there's the issues of major tech companies trying to build up monopolies and fund fascist takeovers of the government (i.e. Elon Musk and Tesla), but that's tangential to the main argument.
I know you think you're being polite with this, but you're actually being incredibly condescending here.
Do they know how to scale up an autonomous taxi service? I mean, maybe? There's no sign of that anywhere in the Tesla data, though.
The original target was Robotaxis to cover "half the US population by the end of 2025," so we're nowhere close to on-target, and those goals weren't given with any asterix on the earnings call when they were declared. I don't see any reason to move the goalpost, it's just a miss taken to a funny conclusion.
https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/tesla-earnings-stock-price-elon-musk/card/musk-s-early-conference-call-comments-focus-on-autonomous-driving-PRJqKKBVRfnHS7TMLDis
Musk's deadlines always have been pure fantasy. But i'm seeing real life hands on reviews of autonomous driving in various places, even Amsterdam with a mayhem of canals and cyclists, it's not entirely there but damn impressive.
The rollout of the cars themselves will be a non issue, they control the factories to pump out the vehicles as they need it, unlike waymo's retrofit way of doing things.
I can't predict the future, had a company car tesla model 3 from 2019 with "full potential for self driving" and after 4 years when the leasing contract ran out, it was still barely on the level of a teenager on their 5th driving lesson. They might very well never reach the point where it's good enough for the real world and stay on really predictable paths.
Maybe, if you believe they're actually autonomous and not just being secretly driven remotely.
heh sorry i left my tin foil hat at home when writing this :P
Yeah any day now
And with any number of them falling out of the sky in a few more years, maybe those two numbers will meet in short time.
Yep it's like saying when Tesla had 0 on the road it would take an infinite amount of time to catch up.