Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
(electrek.co)124 points by apayan 2 days ago
124 points by apayan 2 days ago
Tesla has proven to be very good at lying, moving goalposts, and insisting that this time [x] is right around the corner. I don't know what would be different this time. They might launch it with, like, 5 cars total, or have it be 100% teleoperated, or limit it to side roads.
They might require the passenger to sit in the drivers seat and take liability, or push it back a few more months, or only run it at 3AM when there is no traffic.
I don't think any of these would tank the stock price, since historically Tesla has gotten away with similar skulduggery. I learned the hard way many years ago to not bet against Tesla, and I don't see anything here that would override that lesson.
Fingers crossed for you though - I definitely think Tesla is irrationally priced, and there would be a certain justice in that overinflated valuation sinking down to reality.
Tesla has lost a lot of their lustre this year. Sales plummeting is incontrovertible. Just based on that alone is devastating. But this robotaxi lack of success will not be treated the same anymore.
Totally possible this time is different... but I'm more making the point that if I'd bet against Tesla each time it looked like they would tank, I'd be very broke.
At least historically, Tesla stock has shown a consistent ability to defy reality.
No pressure, but if you feel comfortable with it... would you share the specific contracts you bought? I'll be interested to see how it works out.
> They might launch it with, like, 5 cars total, or have it be 100% teleoperated, or limit it to side roads.
All of these things. On a previous investor call, he said "10-20 Model Ys" would be deployed in Austin.
And that they'd all have remote operators.
And that fully autonomous would be geofenced (or in his words, "with some limitations", because he's allergic to that word).
It's "fully autonomous, driverless self-driving" that's actually heavily Mechanical Turk-ed.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Sure, tell that to Theranos' executives.
Oh yeah, you can't, they're in jail.
Theranos survived for years after people first began raising the alarm... if you'd somehow figured out a way to make a large bet against it, there's a decent change the market would have remained irrational longer than you could have remained solvent unless you were very lucky with your timing.
I mean, the point is, someone betting against Theranos in this way, if it were a public company, would almost certainly have lost money (unless their timing was _perfect_). Enron would be a better example (as it was public); a lot of people, even before Enron's downfall, were fairly sure that Enron was dodgy, but trading on that belief would have been extremely dangerous, because it might take _years_ to come unstuck, and shorts (or puts) ain't free.
Theranos never went public, so the quote about markets doesn't apply.
I do agree with the general sentiment, however. If FSD kills a person, many executives, including the top dog, need to go to jail.
I've been buying Tesla puts at a small scale for the past 6 months, usually puts about a month out.
It's been a great way to lose money so far.
Regardless of what happens theta and IV crush will probably wipe you out. I don't like Tesla's stock but I don't touch it just because both the stock and options tend to be way overpriced.
Yeah it's been a good learning lesson. I only put in what I was comfortable losing (and fast!). The way the stock moved after the absolutely abysmal earnings will certainly stick with me lol
There is a weird disconnect between Reddit and the rest of the world, and it's becoming increasingly obvious when I encounter a Redditor off reddit
When it comes to Tesla Reddit is 95% in line with hacker news sentiment.
I used to be on Reddit a lot when I was a teenager. I remember during a state election I was certain this libertarian representative/delegate would win, he was so popular on Reddit!
I don't think he got even 5% of the vote. The voting on Reddit combined with a number of other features of the site just give you this really twisted idea of the way people around you think. I don't think it's good to even visit it.
Best of luck, I can't tell you how much I have lost having rational takes on Tesla that proved correct in reality, but ultimately immaterial to shareholders.
Tesla stock is a cult stock. People buy it because it goes up. It always goes up. Wall street has long been clued into the brain damage and delusions it's core investors have, and are more than happy to play into the fantasy. Its a company of perpetual massive promises while always carefully dancing around "hammer drop" days.
Robotaxi isn't launching, it's being rolled out over months slowly. Which will turn to years, but like always Elon will be "1 year away" to Tesla paradise. Everything this company is priced on is slowly "rolling out" with the full launch "just around the corner".
Tesla FSD right around the corner
Tesla Semi right around the corner
Tesla <$25k EV right around the corner
Tesla robotaxi right around the corner
Tesla Optimus robot right around the corner
Tesla supercar right around the corner
And people really genuinely believe this is all right around the corner, so load up now while it is still "undervalued"...
But just to be honest here, the people who have full on bought into the hype have made incredible amounts of money.
> But just to be honest here, the people who have full on bought into the hype have made incredible amounts of money.
They'll only have made incredible amounts of money once they sell the stock for an incredible amount of money to a buyer that gives them incredible amounts of money. Before that they just have a share of the above empty promises.
While I agree with everything you said, there was one main factor regarding this particular grift - The public opinion in general used to be a lot more positive about Musk.
I wonder if his constant lies are becoming more scrutinized now. This will make it harder to keep up the game of making outlandish promises that are only 1 year away.
> But Elon has killed his brand with his politics, and the robotaxi initiative is a desperate attempt to gain ground. But it's going to kill someone and it will be 100% on him because he's the one pushing this when there's no way it will ever be ready for real world situations the way Waymo is.
What if his political allies allow and enable him to push this upon the populace despite it killing people.
After all, other industries have been allowed to kill plenty of people if it makes money and lines the pockets of friendly politicians of all stripes.
Maybe nobody is forcing you to get in a robotaxi, but behavior normalization based on availability is a powerful force.
You mean his political allies that he accused of pedophilia?
I don't think that he's accused Texas' governor of that, and that might be the more important relationship in that state. After all, consider how much California helped Tesla early on.
Also, if you think that accusation you mentioned is going matter in the long run, it is possible you are holding them to a higher standard than they hold themselves to.
He apologized last week: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1932695486684950962
> What if his political allies
Does he have any of those left? Like, he just had a very public spat with Trump, and despite his attempts to crawl back, Donald doesn't really seem to be taking the bait. Who is his political constituency at this point, far right never-Trumpers? That seems fairly marginal.
It’s not the people in Robotaxis that are the issue; it’s everyone around the damn things that are the big liability.
Regulatory protection will not help Tesla the first time it runs over a random pedestrian. It will be a PR nightmare.
> But Elon has killed his brand with his politics
I think a lot of people would like to think this is true, ironically because of his politics.
> I have over $100k in Tesla puts.
I also have Tesla puts but that is brave!
While extremely overvalued by any metric, Musk has also been somehow able to keep the stock flying high for years and years on the force of hyperbolic lies (full self driving only a few month away forever) which most of the market keeps believing. It's a fascinating counterexample to the idea that the stock market can't be fooled.
So I only keep a few puts at a time because the hype surrounding the stock tends to outlive the expiration on the options. Every now and then I cash in big when it has a nice drop though.
> There is no way Tesla survives this
Tesla can definitely survive this. They've got a low cost base, tens of millions in the bank, a rabid fan base, access to capital. It'll probably change next quarter, but as of right now they're still profitable.
Their trillion dollar capitalization is highly unlikely survive, but Tesla as a company making cars has a very long runway to survive mistakes.
There is no driver in a robotaxi. If it kills a pedestrian, you can be sure that person’s family will say Tesla is liable.
I have had the exact opposite experience. I have been using FSD on HW3 for a few years and the latest version for me is much safer than me driving. I dont care about your opinions of him killing the brand, they are irrelevant. It's clear that the vision only approach will work, it may need more training data but it will get there. Good luck with your short!
Last I checked there were 35K fatal accidents in the US every year - if FSD can bring that down to 3.5K that will be an obvious win.
I used to try it for a few drives after each release then revert to driving myself. with the newest version i let it drive a lot- and i’m on the older hardware. Everyone likes to bemoan the lying but every corp lies, at least with Tesla you get to point the finger instead of yell at a faceless mass. and if it’s 15 years of lying and a well known political target, then at some point it’s not lying- it’s a feature. people need to take some personal responsibility. also, of course, every day that goes by without a fatality is another day that all the naysayers should capitulate- but we won’t hear it. time and pressure will solve fsd sooner than later, i doubt there is a soul in here that doubts it, so there is also /that/ clock that is ticking.
Cars, one of life’s current greatest killers. by accidents and by pollution-hmmm, let’s run down that evil dude!
edited: made on writing mistakes
I also got the free month of FSD about four months ago and tried it out on my Model 3, and was astonished at how bad it was in the greater Seattle area: I had to manually intervene on about 4 out of every 5 drives. I do not understand how I continue to see so many comments online raving about how great FSD is; I have to conclude these are coming from either desperate stock-boosters or people who drive exclusively on wide, flat roads in Salt Lake City early on weekend mornings when the roads are all empty.
I don't have FSD, just basic autopilot, but I'm unhappy enough with the lane following/braking/accelerating behavior that I only use it in very limited cases.
Unless FSD improves on these -- which I don't think it does, I think it just adds features -- I can't imagine trusting it.
Yes, I'm a control freak, but I wouldn't be happy with a human driver doing the things AP does, so why would I be happy with the car doing it?
It's definitely behind Waymo level, but the selling point of Tesla FSD is apparently that it works with 'normal' cameras as opposed to the super expensive Waymo kit so they can afford to put it in an upper mid range car.
I've seen it action only in my friend's Tesla in SF, and he also had to manually intervene, but to be fair Tesla themselves say you must be ready to take the wheel at any time. I think it may reach fully autonomous level with a few more years in the oven though.
> It's definitely behind Waymo level, but the selling point of Tesla FSD is apparently that it works with 'normal' cameras as opposed to the super expensive Waymo kit so they can afford to put it in an upper mid range car.
A potential problem for Tesla is prices are coming down for expensive sensors like LiDAR. We are at the point where you don't have to go camera only to keep a car affordable.
BYD is putting a dozen cameras, 5 mm-wave radars, and 12 ultrasound sensors on many of their cheaper cars. Go up to around Tesla's price and BYD has models with all those sensors and LiDAR.
> I think it may reach fully autonomous level with a few more years in the oven though.
The problem is Tesla pumps have been saying this for 10 years.
Unfortunately I think Elon can remain a cult leader longer than you can stay solvent
> I have over $100k in Tesla puts.
I mean, if this were a _normal_ company, that would make sense. But it's Tesla, so it's a very dangerous game, because Tesla's stock price is at best only peripherally related to Tesla's business. You're in great risk of Musk posting a meme or having another child with a silly name or whatever, thus pushing up the stock price 10%.
good luck...
- https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1934623551694508456/photo... - "(Obi) The Road Ahead:Pricing Insights On Waymo, Uber and Lyft" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25973106-obi-waymo-6... - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-06-16/why-tesla-c...
Best-selling BEVs worldwide January-April 2025, according to new data from EV Volumes:
1) Tesla Model Y 2) Tesla Model 3 3) BYD Seagull/Dolphin Mini 4) Wuling Mini 5) Geely Geome Xingyuan 6) Xiaomi SU7 7) BYD Yuan Plys/Atto 3 8) BYD Yuan Up/Atto 2 9) Wuling Bingo 10) Xpeng M03
You're cherry picking by listing by model rather than by brand. This advantages Tesla in two ways.
- Tesla has very few models. The model Y is more than half of Tesla's total sales. The Seagull is less than 10% of BYD's total sales. A better metric is total sales per company by either volume or dollars.
- Tesla already sells pretty much everywhere, so don't have the "easy" option of expanding sales by expanding into other markets. OTOH, the Chinese brands are not yet widely available in several large markets.
I think if Robotaxis take off, then his politics won't matter at all. People aren't going to care what brand of car comes to pick them up as long as they feel safe. I've been bearish on Tesla for years and they always prove me wrong. Robotaxis/Waymos are going to be national thing within the decade. It's just a bet on who survives, the biggest loser will be gig workers, that part I feel confident about.
Robotaxis are a pleasant experience now partially because, like early zipcar, it's mostly richer nerds using the service.
Over time they are going to run into all the problems of public infrastructure in low trust places like NYC where, unattended, you will have people use the backseat as a dining room, smoking lounge, bar and toilet. Time will tell how they deal with bad riders.
> Time will tell how they deal with bad riders
Kick them out. Identity is tied to a credit card and a smartphone, after all.
I disagree. Most rideshares happen in urban areas, where people are liberal. Liberals hate Musk. If you have the choice to take MAGAtaxi or a Waymo, as a liberal that's an obvious choice.
I own two Teslas, and drive between Portland and Seattle about once every 10 days, using FSD nearly the entire way.
FSD has gotten amazingly better over the last year, it can and has taken me from driveway to driveway between two cities... when the weather is nice. As soon as there is any weather however, things start to fall apart. It's very clear to me that vision alone wont be the solution to FSD, and is the main reason why I believe Waymo's approach here is simply better.
That's not to say vision wont work when the environment is good - FSD has gotten to the point where when things are optimal, it's a better driver than I am (ie it does better at merging into a lane of traffic better than I could, since it has 360 vision), but it simply isn't stable in the face of dynamic conditions.
I have a Tesla with HW3 and FSD is an absolute dangerous joke. It nearly pulled me into a curb on its first attempt to enter a freeway.
Also, I think it keeps getting overlooked that freeways are designed from the ground up as a exclusive use of motorized vehicles. FSD performs OK there. But, taxi services are everywhere in cities around the clock in all sorts of weather. And I can't imagine trusting FSD for that use case.
Counterpoint: I had a Tesla with HW3 and FSD is absolutely a wonder and a delight (I now have a Tesla with HW4, and it's a noticeable improvement on my M3). It drives me through traffic on my commute everyday, in all kinds of weather, and is a better driver than me (say) 95% of the time.
As I frequently mention in these "sanity response" posts, it's not perfect. Sun in the camera will sometimes cause it to bail. Maybe once a day, I take over because I'm not sure of its decisions. I share the skepticism that the same FSD I'm using can be fully autonomous, but with deep, current map data like Waymo has, maybe they can pull it off.
Did you have the FSD they gave away for free for a few weeks last year? Because I felt like I was going crazy with neighbors saying it was great while I couldn't get it to stop doing dangerous stuff. Turns out they had HW4. I think the new stack or whatever is just not ok on hw3.
I also use FSD HW4 daily, and it really just works well in regular conditions. It's unbelievable how we have a level of autonomy here and now, and not too many people know about it. Out of about 6k miles in the last 7 months, I probably drove 80 or so. I did not have many issues in the rain, but I do have issues in the snow. It's still somewhat unaware of how to drive well in snow. I usually disengage when it's snowy or very icy.
> unbelievable how we have a level of autonomy here and now, and not too many people know about it
Would note that most premium cars sold in America currently have advanced self-driving capabilities. I've personally been more impressed by Mercedes' kit than Tesla's, mostly because the former seems to have done a great job of defining where you can almost trust the system to just work.
As someone who has tried both, FSD is still so much better in my experience. I use FSD in Miami and drive down to Key West often and it drives more than 99% of the trip and it just makes the drive so much more enjoyable. Even with all the recent road work going on, it handles it almost without error. I have the occasional take over due to things like it not wanting to get over soon enough into a lane for a turn or whatever and I just get impatient, move over myself and then re-engage it and relax again. I collect all of the car telemetry via API into graphana and it just amazes me all the sensors and telemetry I can look at and understand while also not driving!
It does limit things. I will say though, from a psychological standpoint, it does do a good job of making me value FSD more! I'm always surprised how much I miss having FSD when I have to drive myself now. Very much a, "ugh I have to drive with my hands??" reaction.
I do find it interesting that it's valuable enough for me that I'll plan my drives between the two cities around the weather, so I can have it on for the trip.
Whatever company gets true self driving (ie no weather restrictions) to the market first is going to make an absolute killing. It's so valuable, Tesla's just isn't reliable yet.
To me, it will only be valuable if the automaker accepts liability for accidents while using FSD. This not only provides some direct accountability for bugs but means I can actually relax while being driven. Anything short of that means that I'll have to keep as much focus on the road as usual since I'm still legally responsible for what happens.
> drive between Portland and Seattle
that's literally just I-5 all the way, with probably 5-10 minutes of street driving at either end. So does FSD really offer _that_ much more of a benefit over adaptive cruise control with lane keeping unless you're continuously overtaking?
I've tried enabling FSD on my Tesla twice (got two one-month trials), and really wanted to love it but was disappointed with the results when not on highways. My wife tried it once and won't touch it again.
> that's literally just the I-5 all the way
You're not wrong, the 3hr drive only involves 14 turns. Where FSD helps:
1. This is a very common trucking route, and often involves navigating 18 wheelers rather than just following, which the FSD is able to navigate. 2. Lots of major mergers, which again requires a bit more navigation. 3. Lane designation changes are fairly common - ie bus only lanes / carpool lanes
It's not a major amount of things, but it's still a noticeable difference between just lane centering / adaptive cruise control.
Yeah, I don't expect that driving on wide laned, well-marked stretches of interstates like I-5 is problematic, especially in nice weather.
Let's try Pittsburgh in snow in December, and then see.
Mind you as recently as 12 months ago there were still videos of Teslas happily taking straight lines through roundabouts.
I have the same experience as you. I live in a state with no snow though.
We are potentially about to see a worse incident than Uber in Phoenix or Cruise in SF. 444 miles per Critical Disengagement is terrible. In 2023, Waymo reported 17,000 miles between Critical Disengagements and have made significant (as seen by a functioning robotaxi service) leaps since.
Cruise in SF was a bit of a freak accident. There were systematic issues that exacerbated the issue, but it wasn't an issue of bad disengagement numbers. In fact, Cruise 2023 actually highlights how misleading disengagement numbers can be, as they reported 0 critical disengagements the entire year over 583k miles. Waymo is extremely consistent about their numbers and they typically sandbag themselves relative to their competitors. Tesla of course doesn't officially report CA numbers, so people rely on crowdsourced data that the company and fans maintain are orders of magnitude lower than reality.
It's entirely possible that the opaqueness and small scale of the Tesla rollout could lead to situations where long tail events like the Cruise collision simply don't occur, or aren't allowed to reach public media.
I think we can agree that people trying to cover-up a horrific accident by lying to regulators is a somewhat different issue though.
The same hubris that powers faulty and half-baked implementations is responsible for lying to regulators.
The problem here is that Musk isn't really a humble man, and he's the face of Tesla. That makes everyone a little on edge. Of course, there's a lot of other people in Tesla who, I'm sure, are fantastic engineers and designers. But still, the feeling of uneasiness ensues.
If companies want to earn the trust of the public, they have to anticipate our questions and concerns and address them. It's a high bar in modern America, which is why so many industries (food, pharmaceuticals, automobiles) are plagued with low-trust.
That is entirely untrue. Fred Lambert was one of the most full-throated supporters of Tesla just a few years ago. He personally referred around 15 million dollars of sales [1] to Tesla. If even Tesla's most fervent supporters now call them liars and dangerous, you should probably listen.
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...
OK but also note there's also not a "both sides" to everything. Some stuff can just suck.
The sibling link was the turning point -- articles about Tesla before the link were generally positive, articles after and including the link were negative.
> Are taxis like the anti-public transportation?
Taxis are a useful way to get around, including to and from public transit. That's all that should matter. Whether they fit into a particular urban vision is secondary to the fact that they're desirable to the people living there.
> Omaha is not very "urban" (in the Manhattan sense)
I split time between Manhattan and Wyoming. I still take taxis from time to time in the latter, e.g. to and from the airport or to and from a bar on the weekend with friends.
Much of the US was built in ways that make mass transit impractical and inefficient, but those same areas have comprehensive road systems already built out, sometimes excessively. That gives self-driving taxis an opportunity to fill in the transit gap in the huge expanses of this country ill-suited for trains and buses, but well-equipped with roads.
I think the actual concern is around medium-to-large cities and metros, where self-driving cars will compete directly with mass transit, much like Uber does, but potentially much more competitively.
As an austinite I'm nervous about these things. My son and his classmates play along the street and I'm 90% sure I saw one of these driving by our house last week, presumably for testing. The street is legally at a higher speed than most people will drive because there's a lot of activity and no sidewalks which I'm about to argue for changing. Normal people will slow when they see kids around but autonomous cars still drive their normal speed.
I'm curious. Suppose I took a taxi to some specific address, which is a large building the occupies a whole block. There are two entrances to the building on that street, at opposite ends of the block.
With a human driven taxi I'd be able to tell the driver which entrance I'd like to be dropped off near.
Does Waymo provide a way to do this? Has Tesla said anything about if they will allow such a thing?
I personally think it'll be fine. FSD is perfect for all my driving. It's been 3000-4000 miles since my last takeover. I know an uber driver who's driven his 16k miles without a safety intervention. And this is without them superfinetuning and doing custom navigation/mapping on a specific town.
I'm a huge proponent of e2e learning for robotics (worked at two places doing e2e before Tesla adopted it) and personally believe its the right approach long term. I also have FSD on my Model 3 and love it for L2+. That said, my experience with disengagements is very different than yours.. I have a few a week for things like road works, school zones, route map following. Perfectly fine for L2+, L4 it would be unacceptable.
If these robotaxis end up looking more like my experience than yours then another layer of trouble will be root causing and fixing failure modes. Training models e2e makes both of these much more difficult.
You could argue its not necessary to achieve performance for an L2+ product and so keeps BOM cost down while still achieving goals. I'm not personally opposed though, the systems I worked on did have other sensors we could use.
That wouldn't resolve the concern around debugging/root-causing and remediating failures more quickly though. You still have a black box system that is difficult to simulate closed loop.
Thinking of re-upping my put options on $TSLA. This launch is destined to be a fiasco. It's unbelievable to me that they doubled down on vision-only at the expense of lidar. Google/Waymo is going to eat their lunch on the self-driving side, and the Tesla brand is dying with consumers. This company is cooked.
So - the cooked-ness of Tesla may depend on what you think Musk's goal was with Tesla.
If you believe he was out to change the world - maybe he'll let Tesla die. It's unlikely they are going to accomplish much else at this point, better, smarter more experienced competitors are sweeping the board.
If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can, he'll probably course correct at some point. Lidar it is clear will be the future of self-driving, and with all the adopters the economies of scale will kick in at some point.
Amongst his many faults, I don't think is one of them. One of his sayings is "if you don't have to revert 10% of your decisions, you're not being aggressive enough".
And you see him undoing decisions quite regularly. For example they tried removing all of the stalks on the steering wheel, but ended up putting one of them back.
What will prevent that course correction is the liability. They sold millions of car that were "FSD ready". If they need to add additional hardware to actually make them FSD ready they'll either have to retrofit it to millions of cars or pay out a giant civil lawsuit.
It's clearly the latter goal, but he just needs to be able to extract money from Tesla rather than keep it going well indefinitely. He's still fighting to get his unprecedented >$50B payout (more money than the company has made selling cars in its entire history). After that he'll try to extract more 10s of billions, like he had started before the courts got in his way. Once he's sucked enough money out of the company he'll move onto other fresher pursuits.
> If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can
Well, twitter shows that he'll burn money if it suits his ego. However, I think his bigger problem is his promise to all existing Tesla owners that FSD would use cameras. If Tesla switches their approach to lidar they'll probably be facing a class action suit from all those camera-only Tesla buyers.
If I owned a Tesla which I paid for the FSD package, I wouldn't care if it had to use LIDAR or not, as long as I didn't have to pay for any extra hardware.
I was a little annoyed at the VW cheating Diesel scandal, but they had the good sense to make the modifications free and pay you almost 7k in "We're Sorry" money, which helps make up for the loss of fuel efficiency.
I don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can. He's already made his money. Now he's gone full Howard Hughes. "I would like to die on Mars" is a direct quote.
Easily accomplished with a 1 way rocket (it doesn't even need a lander).
I think he is on a power trip but the last 6 months have taught him that his opinions are not as valued as he thought.
Actions like leveraging the relationship with Trump to get the government to buy a ton of StarLink and Cybertrucks? Him and his companies hold a few billion in crypto, and is possibly one of the major holders of the Trump shitcoin?
It appears to be self-dealing for profit to me, the Trump relationship being his path to his next hundred billion dollars in net worth. What does it look like to you?
> I don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can.
Oh totally. That's why when Tesla shareholders sued Tesla over Elon's massive compensation package, Elon said, "I reject the compensation package entirely. Pay me nothing! Actually, I'll pay you to let me work here!"
The danger about shorting TSLA is that Elon may have a staff buying puts and calls to balance on the trading troughs. I was watching the trading volume during the big declines in the spring think the support was dropping out but it always came back. The biggest recovery was when he went to the Middle East with Trump. I think his dog and pony show had a big buy in at a critical time.
Could this moment finally be the thing that finally sinks Tesla's ridiculous stock price?
As long as the Robotaxi is just and idea, it can't fail. Once it's real, people can realize what a joke it is.
Relevant Silicon Valley:
"If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!"
This stood out to me:
> the automaker posted a new job listing days ago for engineers to help build a low-latency teleoperation system to operate its “self-driving” cars and robots.
It's June 17; they're supposedly launching in five days. Even if it's 95% off-the-shelf software, that timeframe for getting it up and debugged, then hiring enough humans to operate it, makes absolutely no sense. After nearly a decade of broken promises about FSD, has Elon finally trapped himself? Will there be a handful of "robotaxis" circling around a few blocks of Austin with Mexicans hiding in the frunk to drive them?
I'm glad I don't live there.
Check the source. Elektrek cranks out anti-Tesla articles. Hardly fair and objective.
A public display of seething hate aimed at someone adding to the world from someone only attempting to critique it. Fred, checks notes, tracks human beings that kill each other for sport for money, to make money. It must not be lucrative enough so he gets the rest of his green from writing half-truth hit pieces about companies that have more success. I'm surprised he's not writing for business insider.
Tesla had more chance to succeed than Waymo. It's impossible for Waymo to match Tesla in real world training and testing data. Somehow Waymo is winning.
Waymo chose an approach that seems geared towards actually doing the task.
Tesla tried for the moonshot - They wanted a consumer car with cheap sensor hardware to perform the job. Trusting that computing "smarts" could solve the rest of the problem.
I'm in Atlanta where Waymos have started popping up left and right - the sensor bank on these things is HUGE. You can spot 'em from way far off... Giant sensors on top. Big sensors on the front wheel wells back wheel wells, big sensors on both front and back. Big sensors basically all over them.
I'm of the opinion now that Tesla was just way, WAY off base about what sort of requirements exist for sensing, and that they don't, in fact, have much more real world training data because their data is just garbage from the cameras.
Waymo is winning because Waymo accepted the actual requirements early. Tesla is off in lala land with a dead end solution. Lots of great marketing from tesla... but very little progress now in years. They really seem stuck in a local optimum with the camera-only approach, and it's not close to delivering the promised experience.
> consumer car with cheap sensor hardware to perform the job
Except, they took even that out because a certain someone leading the company thought they don’t need the sensors. It’s like someone trying to figure out how to make a bicycle balance itself and they decide to take the wheels off.
Waymo is winning by losing money as fast as they can?
Have you looked at their financials? They're terrible.
Waymo has ~40 million miles of test data. Tesla has ~4B miles. But for training both quantity and quality are important. Tesla only uploads excerpts and metadata for its 4B miles, and it's video only. Waymo can fully analyze all 40M miles, and it's much richer, with LIDAR and other sensors.
My feeling is that Waymo has the data advantage.
You can also just buy camera data from other OEMs, not to mention the vast amounts available from public sources like YouTube or Google maps vehicles that are accessible to them if they really care. The vast, vast majority of that data is uninteresting though. It's not much better than simulation data, which Waymo has many tens of billions of miles worth.
I’ll trust Waymo’s 40 million over Tesla’s 4B any day. You can make something work most of the times with our vision. But when there is no one to man the car, most of the times isn’t good enough
Waymo has already lapped Tesla. They sell 250,000 rides per week and rising, for a total well over 10 million. That compares to precisely zero rides sold commercially by Tesla. It's possible Tesla could catch up, but first they need to stop losing ground and develop technology that can actually compete with their leading competitor. Plus, right now the Tesla brand is synonymous with the most obnoxious blowhard in America. Meanwhile the Waymo brand is on the way to becoming the "Kleenex" of self-driving technology.
Waymo has been "scaling" down the Peninsula from SF for about 18 months now, and it's still not generally available.
Tesla can scale by simply adding vehicles.
June 17, 2025: "Ride to more places in the Bay and LA. Starting today in SF, with new areas coming to LA later this week. Download the Waymo One app to see our new service areas."
Scale what? Tesla does not have and has never had a commercial self-driving taxi service.
Scaling by applying for expanded operational areas is how all deployments in California have to work, by law. Tesla avoids that by not operating robotaxi fleets in California and not submitting applications or mileage data for the vehicles they have there.
> Tesla can scale by simply adding vehicles
Between Elon having personally alienated voters in cities and Tesla's continued reliance on remote drivers, Tesla's ability to produce these vehicles seems low on the list of scaling constraints.
The Tesla approach was kind of magical thinking; put enough data into the magic box, and eventually a perfect driver will pop out. In some ways it's similar to the "just make a big enough LLM and it will be GAI" thing (a model which has pretty much fallen out of favour even with the most relentlessly optimistic LLM vendors in favour of so-called reasoning models).
In reality, just shovelling data into a box is not sufficient.
Tesla could have more camera data in sum (that's not even clear - transmitting and storing data from all the cars on the road is no easy task - L4 companies typically pysically remove drives and use appliances to suck data off the hard drives), but Waymo has more camera data per car (29 cameras) and higher fidelity data overall (including lidar, radar, and microphone data). Tesla can't magically enhance data it didn't collect.
This is a crippling disadvantage. Consider what it takes to evaluate a single software release for a robotaxi.
If you have a simulator, you can take long tail distribution events and just resimulate your software to see if there are regressions against those events. (Waymo, Zoox)
If you don't, or your simulator has too much error, you have to deploy your software in cars in "ghost mode" and hope that sufficient miles see rare and scary situations recur. You then need to find those specific situations and check if your software did a good job (vs just getting lucky). But what if you need to A/B test a change? What if you need to A/B test 100 changes made by different engineers? How do you ensure you're testing the right thing? (Tesla)
And if you have a simulator that _sucks_ because it doesn't have physics-grounded understanding of distances (i.e. it's based on distance estimates from camera), then you can easily trick yourself into thinking your software is doing the right thing, right up until you start killing people.
Another way to look at it is: most driving data is actually very low in signal. You want all the hard driving miles, and in high resolution, so that you can basically generate the world's best unit testing suite for the software driver. You can just throw the rest of the driving data away -- and you must, because nobody has that much storage and unit economics still matter.
This is to say nothing of the fact that differences between hardware matter too. Tesla has a bunch of car models out there, and software working well one one model may not actually work well on another.
"Waymo is winning". One wonders why most people never see any of these videos but only hear about how bad Tesla FSD is?
https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1928477936845226469
https://x.com/TeslaCamera/status/1929167075731239226
https://x.com/friscolive415/status/1881181885445063041
https://x.com/LAMultiBroker/status/1885370114054512921
https://x.com/ananayarora/status/1808679192432927153
https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1929590206488883246
https://x.com/TheTrailerDan/status/1934618081881370766
https://x.com/JeffTutorials/status/1778188663253574035
https://x.com/ScannerPacific/status/1935016023536844960
https://x.com/greggertruck/status/1864836542402797812
https://x.com/neil_csagi/status/1803229926033858746
I could post these all day ...
I have over $100k in Tesla puts.
There is no way Tesla survives this. They have plummeting sales every quarter, and Elon is pushing out a product that is going to get into an accident within the first week.
Robotaxis are glorified Ubers and will never level up to Waymos. FSD is useless if you have to keep your eye on the wheel and road.
I have a Tesla Model Y. It's my favorite car I've ever driven. I subscribed to FSD as recently as last month for one month to try it out. It doesn't work as well as a Waymo, not even close. It still feels like a really good high school demo but not close to being in the same ballpark as Waymo.
But Elon has killed his brand with his politics, and the robotaxi initiative is a desperate attempt to gain ground. But it's going to kill someone and it will be 100% on him because he's the one pushing this when there's no way it will ever be ready for real world situations the way Waymo is.