The Electrek article (https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing...) contains more information. It's 4 crashes in around 250,000 miles. But Tesla redacts most information in these reports unlike e.g. Waymo, so the information is limited. If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Personally, I'd be interested in how often the safety drivers had to intervene. But I assume we'll never get that information.
> If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Companies have discovered that trust does not matter. People forget in one or two weeks or so. You can do very bad things and most people will still trust you in the long run. Especially if your offer is a few dollars cheaper than the competition.
The extra sad part is that this will make roads unsafer for informed people too.
I don't think any meaningful comparison is possible here. The type of driving matters, you have to compare similar driving profiles. And in this case there are actually humans on board. So the real comparison would have to be how many accidents (with Tesla at fault) and how many safety driver interventions that otherwise would have likely resulted in an accident. And we don't have that information.
Waymo has a well deserved reputation for vastly reducing the frequency and severity of accidents where it is at fault.
But if you look at the data for all crashes, regardless of fault, it's clear that Waymo also reduces the frequency and severity of crashes where other drivers are at fault.
Waymo's "we got hit by someone else" crashes are substantially lower per mil, probably on the order of 50% to 70% reduction, not just the crashes it causes.
Yes, because as it turns out, defensive driving works, the average American motorist is just bad at it. Fully agreeing with your point, just piling on because I'm exhausted (as both pedestrian and motorist) with how bad most motorists are
Self-driving cars also require us human drivers to learn new defensive-driving skills.
A month or two back, I was driving down a steep one-way, three-lane street in SF, late on a rainy night. I saw a Waymo stopped at the left curb and I moved to the from the left lane to the center lane in case it started to pull out into the left lane. There were no cars in front of it or behind it, so I was shocked to see it quickly leave the curb at about a 45 degree angle, as if it were pulling out of a tight spot with a car parked just in front of it, but much faster. If I saw a human driver doing that, it would almost certainly mean they are trying to get all the way across the street immediately. If it was doing that, there is no way I could stop in time on the wet downhill. I tried, but that just made steering difficult as my anti-lock brakes struggled to find any traction at all. Then, just as quickly, it straightened out in the left lane. I'm glad I was the only other car around.
One element of defensive driving is thinking about how to avoid surprising other drivers. When will self-driving cars' defensive driving rise to that level? Waymo certainly wasn't there in that situation on that night.
This really depends on the definition of a 'crash'. For example, fatal accident > insurance claim > minor incident.
If we use insurance claim as the definition then:
- The average driver files an insurance claim for a car crash about once every 17.9 years [1]
- The average driver drives 13,476 miles per year [2]
- This means one insurance claim per 241,220 miles driven by a human driver.
with that said: unattended vehicles are required to report every single incident no matter how minor or who is at fault. adults might just shrug off a minor contact and get on with their day without reporting or claiming it.
readily located a variety of news outlets investigating the same question and summarizing that in waymos case human drivers were mostly at fault… even if you ignore stuff that smacks of PR/industry or from waymo itself…
piling on to the flaws in comparing these: waymos operate in major metros that just have higher crashes and claims to begin with. im spitballing with nationwide averages but i think a serious inquiry/research would have to drill into the crash rates for the cities theyre operating in and where each incident occurred.
eg, i live in los angeles and have over 2,000,000 incident free miles out here but ive been hit no less than four times in austin TX and doubt i even cracked 20,000mi there.
I’d be interested in how waymo compares against LA drivers operating in LA…… against Austin drivers operating in Austin. More so than how they compare to all drivers on average nationwide. Without assessing that… say if waymo has a comparable incident rate as Tesla in Austin, youd be overlooking that by comparing a company operating in multiple markets- to one thats only in Austin.
I will rephrase GP. Most taxis/Uber drivers have less than one minor accident every 250k miles. The fact that "FSD"+dedicated driver have more indicate to me that FSD is more dangerous for an experienced driver in urban settings than nothing.
It's a mistake to compare with the _average_ human driver.
It's reasonable to assume that a seasoned taxi driver will be _better_ than the average human driver. Many serious accidents happen because the driver was inebriated or drowsy/falling asleep, which shouldn't be the case with taxi drivers.
For a proper comparison, we should look at the crash record for _taxi drivers_, not the general population.
Furthermore, if I'm getting an Uber/Lyft I'm likely to choose drivers with a 5-star rating or close to it. That basically filters out all poor drivers. Which means that not only should we compare robo-taxis with taxi drivers, but with the _top rated taxi drivers_.
If true thats seriously bad stat. You buy a car, if you drive even modestly, in 15-20 years you will end up in 3-5 accidents on average. Much worse than me with mildly less kms (0 bad accidents, 1 light, few times avoiding them via quick reactions in complex situations that most probably no current self-drive could handle well if at all, ie hearing car crashes behind the bend and breaking in advance, or few cars behind us and moving a bit further to avoid being also hit in bowling style).
Yeah this article was better – can we just change the link to that one?
It also mentioned that Tesla hasn't registered for a permit in CA, which would require disclosing a lot more (like what you're asking for). Which is telling.
All while Waymo is expanding to more and more cities, including Detroit where it will deal with snow and ice. Waymo is years ahead of Tesla in the self-driving race. It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car.
I think is really interesting how it's often suggested Waymo is at a disadvantage over Tesla due to its reliance on LIDAR and the costs associated with it. But the reality is that it's enabled Waymo to move faster and gain significant more operational experience than Tesla, and that's far more important than front loading with cost reductions in a service business.
Tesla have been operating as a product business, and cost reduction of that product was key to scale and profitability. I completely understand why they have focused on optical sensors for autopilot, lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly, they need to get to market and gain operational experience. Doing that with more expensive equipment to move faster is exactly what was needed. They can worry about cost of building their cars later, much later.
It's already cost effective. Lidar prices have been divided by like 10 in a bit more than a decade. I've read a Wall street story about a SV company that wanted to enter the Lidar market for cars, only to bifurcate to a weird scam and a SPAC when they realized as the prices fell that Lidar would never be a very profitable.
Lidar production costs have already scaled. Now it need more miniaturization (which will help with production costs even more) and something against diffraction.
Oh, yeh, don't get me wrong. I meant impossibly expensive to drop into a mid range car with no scaling up from a higher value lower volume product range first.
It's also quite ugly, not sure you can have it on a convertible etc. - all probably solvable, but not ideal. I can see why Tesla tried the camera only approach but doesn't look like it's working out
To each their own, but it's possible having sensor bumps on your car become a status symbol that indicates you can afford a private driver.
> not sure you can have it on a convertible etc.
Radically different car shapes are possible when human driving never happens or is very rare. Maybe a small van (like a private lounge on wheels, or a train observation car) with a huge panoramic sunroof becomes en vogue.
Due to its choice to use LIDAR. Waymo has tested a working system using cameras only, but they choose to use LIDAR because it is safer and does not significantly change cost.
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business
The cost for Waymo is the whole car, so Waymo is in it at ~$100k per operational taxi. They are beholden to hardware manufacturers for their product.
Tesla is trying to get in at ~$20k per operational taxi, with everything made in house.
Assuming Tesla can figure out it's FSD (and convince people it's safe), they could dramatically undercut Waymo on price, while still being profitable. If a Waymo to the airport is $20, and Robotaxi is $5, Tesla will win, regardless of anything else (assuming equal safety).
This is just Google doing what they've done for years now: start with the software, partner with hardware OEMs, then build their own hardware. Android to Nexus to Pixel line is one example, Google Now on Tap to their own smart speakers is another (though they may not have hit the third step there yet), and Waymo / Google Maps to self driving is following the same path.
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly
This isn't the main factor. The main factor is Waymo only does this one thing. Tesla has been: building electric cars and forcing all car makers to do the same; building charging networks; funding and releasing free of charge battery tech research improvements; and doing self driving, and all of it while trying to make a profit to keep running. Waymo is funded by Google, which has infinitely deep ads-spying-on-you pockets. Which is just much, much easier.
Building a self-driving car is more difficult as evidenced by no one having delivered one except for Google. Many companies (including astronomically rich ones like Apple) have tried.
The cost discussion on LIDAR always confused a layman like me. How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge? LIDAR seems to be the only thing that could make sense to me. The fact Tesla does it with only cameras (please correct me understanding if I'm wrong) never made sense to me. The benefits of LIDAR seem huge and I'd assume they'd just become more cost effective over time if the tech became more high in demand.
Lidar will continue to get cheaper, but it has fundamental features that limit how cheap it can get that passive vision does not.
You’re sending your own illumination energy into the environment. This has to be large enough that you can detect the small fraction of it that is reflected back at your sensor, while not being hazardous to anything it hits, notably eyeballs, but also other lidar sensors and cameras around you. To see far down the road, you have to put out quite a lot of energy.
Also, lidar data is not magic: it has its own issues and techniques to master. Since you need vision as well, you have at least two long range sensor technologies to get your head around. Plus the very real issue of how to handle their apparent disagreements.
The evidence from human drivers is that you don’t absolutely need an active illumination sensor to be as good as a human.
The decision to skip LiDAR is based on managing complexity as well as cost, both of which could reduce risk getting to market.
That’s the argument. I don’t know who is right. Waymo has fielded taxis, while Tesla is driving more but easier autonomous miles.
The acid test: I don’t use the partial autonomy in my Tesla today.
Does the "sensor fusion" argument that Tesla made against LiDAR make as much sense now that everyone is basically just plugging all the sensor data into a large NN model?
> How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge?
LiDARs at the time Tesla decided against them were $75k per unit. Currently they are $9,300 per car with some promising innovations around solid state LiDAR which could push per-unit down to hundreds of dollars.
Tesla went consumer first so at the time, a car would've likely cost $200k+ so it makes sense why they didn't integrate it. I believe their idea was to kick off a flywheel effect on training data.
> lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
I just don't buy this at all
>"The new iPad Pro adds ... a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner that delivers cutting-edge depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more pro workflows and supporting pro photo and video apps." [1]
Yes of course the specs of LiDAR on a car are higher but if apple are putting it on iPads I just don't buy the theory that an affordable car-spec LiDAR is totally out of the realm of the possible. One of the things istr Elon Musk saying is that one of the reasons they got rid of the LiDAR is the problem of sensor fusion - what do you do when the LiDAR says one thing and the vision says something different.
Tesla got rid of radar because of sensor fusion, and particularly for reasons that wouldn't apply to high resolution radar. Sensor fusion with a high resolution source like LiDAR isn't particularly tricky.
The iPad lidar has a range of a handful of meters indoors and is not safety critical.
Higher specs can make all the difference. A model rocket engine vs Space Shuttle main engine, for an extreme example. Or a pistol round vs an anti-armor tank round. The cost of the former says nothing at all about the latter.
They are getting there. But that link has big caveats. Not sure how cool it is to endanger other people’s cameras.
From your linked page:
>
Important Use responsibly
The lidar and features that can rely on it are supplements to safe driving practices. They do not reduce or replace the need for the driver to stay attentive and focused on driving safely.
Safe for the eyes
The lidar is not harmful to the eyes.
Lidar light waves can damage external cameras
Do not point a camera directly at the lidar. The lidar, being a laser based system, uses infrared light waves that may cause damage to certain camera devices. This can include smartphones or phones equipped with a camera.
It seems to me Tesla's mistake was over optimism about AI. Musk always seemed to believe they'd have it cracked the following year but it seems to be taking its time.
Exactly, and the Waymo sensors are practically a superset of those of Tesla, so with all the acquired data, then can build models that slowly phase out the need for Lidars.
The surprising thing to me is when you look at Starlink, there was a very expensive blocker there: consumer phased array. Prior to Starlink, I think the cheapest consumer unit was around $50k. That did not stop Musk from charging ahead.
Is there some technological thing about LiDAR that would prevent similar cost reductions? Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
LIDAR has seen many cost reductions as capabilities continue to increase. I don't know the area well enough to speculate how much optimization might be left.
> Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
It seems to be a "burn the ships" style bet that the Tesla engineers will get to camera-only self driving first without having ever relied on LIDAR. It's equally as likely (or moreso) that Waymo could get there first with better ground truth data from the LIDAR.
Waymo can just add the cameras exactly the way Tesla has, and train based only on that information.
Now it has tons and tons of data, they could gradually remove the Lidar on cities that they've driven over and over again. IF driving without Lidar is worth it... maybe it isn't even worth it and we should pursue using Lidars in order to further reduce accidents.
Meanwhile people use Tesla sporadically in a few spots they consider safe, they will always have data that isn't useful at all, as it can already drive on those spots.
--
Another thing, we can definitely afford to have Lidars on every car, if that would make our cars safer.
Imagine if China does a huge supply chain of Lidars, I bet the cost would be very tiny. And this is supposing there aren't any more automation and productivity gains in the future, which is very unlikely.
Lidar production just doesn't have that big scale, because it's a very tiny market as of now. With scale, those prices would fall like batteries and other hardware have fallen with the years.
Of course it’s not only possible but virtually a certainty that an approach to doing anything difficult will be refined, modified and improved as lessons are learned.
Does anyone now care how much SpaceX changed their reuse strategy for the falcon 9?
Of course not. It only matters that they found a way that works.
>You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?
There's nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but it's objectively a different story when the company chooses to turn it into an enormous financial liability. That is a massive practical difference, with extremely pertinent example being Tesla vs SpaceX. SpaceX has had enormous success running a hardware rich testing regime, and they're very willing to move fast and break things... but NEVER with customer payloads. Which is how that aphorism was supposed to be applied. You can and often should be extremely aggressive exploring the entire problem space in testing before you move into final build and then production, but once you're dealing with customers then it has to be done very differently.
Tesla absolutely could have experimented to their heart's desire without making any financial promises let alone actually entering into end customer contracts and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in preorder money for a future feature on ass-pulled timelines. But that's not the path they took, and that leaves them in a much uglier position when it comes to reacting to data and changing their approach because they've already locked in hardware to paying customers. That's the exact opposite of what SpaceX or any normal responsible company does.
It would be sad if Tesla or some other entity doesn't compete in the space? I dont want a monolpoly or even a duopoly. Give me 4 or 5 players for true choice and competition.
Has Waymo become successful reaching a critical mass of users yet? If so, they would most likely shut it down based on historical examples. Imagine if they had sold those deprecated products instead. Maybe not a financial significance, but there'd be some interesting products still kicking
Considering Boston Dynamics sat around for like 15 years being a research lab and only started commercializing when they were sold... I'd agree.
Argue with that as you like but Google _loves_ to sit around on good ideas and, in my opinion, hamstring them away from pushing their products to commercialization.
What's the highest revenue product that Google shut down? Maybe Google+? But I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is already making way more revenue than Google+ ever did, while barely scratching the surface of immediate demand.
was G+ around long enough to generate revenue at all? there was no activity on it that would have been worthy to buy ad space within it. obviously, theGoog had the advantage of owning the ad space just like they had an advantage of converting all G users to G+ users without consent from those users. Even with that, they still had no users
Yeah, I don't blame anyone for thinking Google shuts down products constantly, but to be fair, they're making hundreds of billions per year and the stuff they shut down are almost all little hobby projects that people love, but are a terrible business for them. That's pretty different from shutting down Waymo.
Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market.
I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
Robot Taxis will be competing on price. Whoever can release the lowest cost per mile and most reliable taxi will take lion's share simply because consumers are generally price conscious about transport. Very few will be analyzing the data if two are judged to be 'safe enough', it will come down to price.
Companies like BYD and Tesla are positioned well for that if they can get their AV functionality proven out as both are fully integrated car manufacturers.
Waymo doesn't have in-house manufacturing and is, to my knowledge, purely software so they have lots of vendors along with a relatively low output of vehicles. Their 2025 and 2026 plan is to build 2,500 new cars per year. Each Waymo car currently costs over $100k. Even if Tesla was pushing out Model Ys as their robotaxi platform, they could flood the market very easily in both scale and price per mile _if_ UFSD (unsupervised FSD) was proven.
I did a basic napkin calculation in the other comment. The price of the car is not that relevant per km than you make it to be.
I think self driving will be a commodity in the long term and every car will be able to do it. If Tesla will solve it purly by cameras, every other car manufacturer will be able to add this too. Perhaps a few years later but they will be able to do it too.
So Tesla has to leverage the first mover advantage, and they are loosing this already.
And while Musk says robot taxis are fundamental to tesla, the taxi market is actually not that big. All the broad nice areas like small cities etc. will buy a small fleet of cars and i don't think the price point of a Tesla will that crazy much cheaper than whatever everyone else will have that it will be obvous for everyone to just buy the Tesla model.
I alone will not use Tesla alone for Musk. Despite that, people might want to pay a euro more to have a SVU to have space or higher entry point than choosing the cheapest Tesla model to drive with.
Tesla can't flood the market very easily. If they could, they would have done it. And its expected that Tesla will not suddenly find the solution to their problems. They are optimizing away the next 9 at the 9x% reliability. Every additional 9 will take the same amount as the previous 9. And the nines are quite relevant if you look how many km these cars will have to drive.
If Americans were price conscious about transport they wouldn't be driving $60,000, 15mpg, oversized pickup trucks to go drop off their kids at daycare and commute to their office job, they'd be riding the bus.
Most Americans don't seem to consider the cost of their transportation in the slightest.
People who use ride share use more than one app because they can pick the one that is the cheapest. The people who use these will be price conscious.
Of course there will be other factors like amenities.
Personally, I think 'style' is going to be a non-insignificant factor to it as well. Few normies will want to get out of a 'nerd car' that has bulbous sensors all over it if they can pay a bit more to have a cooler looking ride, it's the Prius effect.
The style thing is just my opinion though but price will be the major one. People will tolerate an ugly robotaxi if it is significantly cheaper or more convenient.
With ride share you can take the cheap option 99 times out of 100, and then rent a limo for your hot date. And then rent a truck or movers when you need to move something. People buying vehicles usually buy something that covers all their needs, however rare.
So in other words, they value other things much higher than cost? Gee, sure sounds like exactly what I stated. People care more about other things than the cost, like how cool they look or how much departure angle they can achieve while they drive around in a parking garage. Overall TCO rarely figures into it.
I think other people might be smarter than you give them credit for and (for example) may chose a 30 minute car commute (plus associated dollar costs) over a much longer and multi-step public transportation trip.
Calculate how much a car can drive (200-400k km), then the avg cost of a car (50k vs. 100k) and the avg taxi route (5-30km).
The car itself is a price point of 10 to 40 cent pro km which has impact on the journey for sure but a lot less that it might be the reason.
if you tell me, that i can take the saver car and pay 1 euro more with a 20 euro fair, I wouldn't care.
Nonetheless, economy of scale has happened already at lidar and continues to happen.
If tesla can't get it running properly in bad weather but waymo can, they can also compensate it just by driving at situations were tesla doesn't want to drive.
But hey its just brainstorming at this point as tesla is not close enough to waymo to compare it properly. And while waymo exists, plenty of other companies exist too doing this. Nvidia itself will keep building their car platform which will level the playfield even more.
Whatever market selfdriving cars are, it will be split between everyone and no tesla will not just 'win' this. It will be a race to the bottom for everyone reducing the revenue to a commodity.
I've been asking for independent analysis for years now. The data is there. Yet all the headlines are from people who have an obvious bias - this is the first where I've seen a headline where there is no evidence that the data has been looked at.
There are many ways to "lie with statistics". Comparing all drivers - including those who are driving in weather self driving cars are not allowed to see - for example. there are many others and I want some deep analysis to know how they are doing and so far I've not seen it.
The biggest clue is that Tesla still needs to have a human supervisor in the car. They aren't doing that for show, it's an active admission that the tech isn't there yet.
From this article, Tesla crashes 50% more often. But hard to compare when one has a human safety driver and the other does not.
> the report finds that Tesla Robotaxis crash approximately once every 62,500 miles. Waymo vehicles, which have been involved in 1,267 crashes since the service went live, crash approximately every 98,600 miles. And, again, Waymo does not have human safety monitors inside its vehicles, unlike Tesla's Robotaxis.
Above human rates for sure. In the 90s in my country, accident rate were 5 for a million kilometer (so 5 for 621371,192 miles), and the rate have come down since.
Basically they are crashing at the same rate as 18-25 years old in the 90s, in France. When we could still drink like 3 glasses and drive.
Accountability is a pretty big issue, I think. We've accepted, for better or worse, a certain level of human-caused crashes for 100 years or so. If machines take the wheel they have to be an order of magnitude (or more) better.
Driverless Teslas are the hit pieces. Hitting people. Ayooo.
Seriously though, Tesla has an extension history of irresponsibly selling "autopilot" which killed a ton of people. Because they don't take safety seriously. Waymo hasn't.
As a massive advocate of FSD (and someone who's currently running 14.1.4, their very latest FSD build) it is absolutely in no way ready for unsupervised FSD. It still makes silly mistakes, and the latest build is terrified of leaves and will swerve across lane dividers to desperately avoid a leaf blowing into it's path.
I love FSD, I use it for 99% of my driving, and when it's working right it's an incredibly technology that overall makes my driving safer, but there's absolutely areas of weakness that every FSD user knows it cannot be trusted in under any circumstances and you must closely supervise and be ready to take over at any time.
Elon already stopped talking about the robotaxi and is now onto the Optimus bot, which should buy him at least another year or two of swindling investors.
No doubt, but his ability to deliver has totally faltered.
He also built himself as an ideologue, which has/will greatly impact the ability to attract and retain talent. At the end of the day, Elon is still relying on smart people to execute these projects.
Elon is looking a lot like the amazing artist who had a golden era of great works, and now is killing himself trying to fake his way back to his former self.
We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them.
Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic.
An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.
Cats shouldn't be outside. A human driver probably would have hit the cat, too. Heck, my neighbor in his F250 purposefully hits cats and brags about it.
The American fetish with locking cats indoors is extremely weird, and your neighbour sounds like a first class bellend (and the one who belongs in confinement, at best).
Didn't this happen before with a safety monitor on their phone? I seem to remember another Robo taxi company and it hit someone who was crossing the street.
It feels extremely disingenuous to have a video of burned Teslas (from vandalism) at the top of the article... why do this? Is there any explanation for this except malice? It has absolutely nothing to do with the safety of robotaxis.
Isn't it spicy enough to just report on the safety issues from Robotaxis?
Also:
> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or stationary, one incident involved contact with a fixed object in a parking area. Analysts say this suggests the system's perception and decision-making may not be giving monitors enough time to react, a key issue NHTSA has previously flagged in other FSD-related investigations.
Interesting for sure. This is also what some of the FSD influencers see when they test the limits (especially with parking with small obstacles).
All of the four crashes mentioned are low to no speed crashes.
At least two, to attestation of another person, was because an inattentive SUV hit the back of the car when it was making a left turn. People really want Tesla to not be good at self-driving.
None of these crashes occurred at higher than 8 MPH.
But yeah, let's not mention Waymo crashing into stationary objects and doing dangerous maneuvers such as cutting opposing traffic off during left turns or making turns from the middle lane despite having like 8x more sensors than Tesla does and pre-trained mapping
Crashes happen. Tesla is currently having a rash of them but Waymo isn't immune to "wtf how" kinds of crashes even with all of its built-in advantages (far more sensors and having pre-mapping).
Looks to me like a "you might also be interested in..." sort of thing, not something that's supposed to be part of the article. If you're reading an article about Tesla you may also like this video about Tesla.
At the very top of the article? Showing vandalism from 6 months ago rather than all the crazy Tesla news this week (like Elon's "$1tn" pay package, which is equally as spicy).
Again, at a certain point, it gets harder to defend as harmless with the visual of completely destroyed Teslas.
Remember that the purpose of a news site is to make money by driving clicks so they can show advertising. What's more likely to get clicked: a story about CEO pay with a thumbnail of... I don't know, Elon Musk looking slightly disheveled as usual? Or a story about burning cars?
Keep in mind that if their choice of video annoys you to the extent that you complain about how horribly biased they are against Tesla, then mission accomplished as far as they're concerned. That's more people clicking the article and watching the video's preroll ad to see what you're talking about.
Perhaps Musk is so busy making up shit about what is happening in the UK and trying to foment a civil war there, that he doesn't have time to manage Tesla?
The root of Tesla's problems here is Musk's decision to drop LIDAR.
The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
Humans can do this because we have a very rich well-developed world model that allows us to fill in the gaps. We don't do it perfectly but we can do it decently well.
Modern AIs, or at least the ones small enough to be run on smaller machines that are economical to put in cars, don't have a rich world model like that. They're doing stimulus response backed by a database. That's going to break down at all kinds of edge cases.
The way to compensate for this is to give the car superhuman senses like LIDAR. The car is much dumber than a person but it can perceive its environment orders of magnitude better than a person, which compensates well enough that it has a chance of driving at least as well as a person.
I don't think it is only a matter of building a better world model. CCD sensors work very differently than human eyes and have problems such as over- and underexposure that preclude their use for safe driving in certain conditions. If you were to try driving a car with a VR headset fed from dual CCD sensors into a sunset as in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv... you would get into trouble too.
> The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only.
I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...
The Electrek article (https://electrek.co/2025/10/29/tesla-robotaxis-keep-crashing...) contains more information. It's 4 crashes in around 250,000 miles. But Tesla redacts most information in these reports unlike e.g. Waymo, so the information is limited. If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Personally, I'd be interested in how often the safety drivers had to intervene. But I assume we'll never get that information.
> If Tesla wants people to trust them regarding safety, this is not the way to go.
Companies have discovered that trust does not matter. People forget in one or two weeks or so. You can do very bad things and most people will still trust you in the long run. Especially if your offer is a few dollars cheaper than the competition.
The extra sad part is that this will make roads unsafer for informed people too.
Americans have 1 day memories. Once the next news cycle starts most people move on.
That + Americans insane brand loyalty.
In general, yeah. Personally, I don't even like getting in a Lyft/Uber that's a Tesla knowing the door can fail in the event of an accident.
It would be nice if you could specify no Teslas. The ride quality also sucks
Lol wut https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/waymo-sues-dmv-t...
4 Crashes in a drive of 250k miles. How good/bad is this with human driving? I couldn't compare this with human driving. Though I found a report on fatal crashes here - https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
I don't think any meaningful comparison is possible here. The type of driving matters, you have to compare similar driving profiles. And in this case there are actually humans on board. So the real comparison would have to be how many accidents (with Tesla at fault) and how many safety driver interventions that otherwise would have likely resulted in an accident. And we don't have that information.
> how many accidents (with Tesla at fault)
It's not just about fault.
Waymo has a well deserved reputation for vastly reducing the frequency and severity of accidents where it is at fault.
But if you look at the data for all crashes, regardless of fault, it's clear that Waymo also reduces the frequency and severity of crashes where other drivers are at fault.
Waymo's "we got hit by someone else" crashes are substantially lower per mil, probably on the order of 50% to 70% reduction, not just the crashes it causes.
Yes, because as it turns out, defensive driving works, the average American motorist is just bad at it. Fully agreeing with your point, just piling on because I'm exhausted (as both pedestrian and motorist) with how bad most motorists are
Self-driving cars also require us human drivers to learn new defensive-driving skills.
A month or two back, I was driving down a steep one-way, three-lane street in SF, late on a rainy night. I saw a Waymo stopped at the left curb and I moved to the from the left lane to the center lane in case it started to pull out into the left lane. There were no cars in front of it or behind it, so I was shocked to see it quickly leave the curb at about a 45 degree angle, as if it were pulling out of a tight spot with a car parked just in front of it, but much faster. If I saw a human driver doing that, it would almost certainly mean they are trying to get all the way across the street immediately. If it was doing that, there is no way I could stop in time on the wet downhill. I tried, but that just made steering difficult as my anti-lock brakes struggled to find any traction at all. Then, just as quickly, it straightened out in the left lane. I'm glad I was the only other car around.
One element of defensive driving is thinking about how to avoid surprising other drivers. When will self-driving cars' defensive driving rise to that level? Waymo certainly wasn't there in that situation on that night.
This really depends on the definition of a 'crash'. For example, fatal accident > insurance claim > minor incident.
If we use insurance claim as the definition then: - The average driver files an insurance claim for a car crash about once every 17.9 years [1] - The average driver drives 13,476 miles per year [2] - This means one insurance claim per 241,220 miles driven by a human driver.
1. https://www.gtslawfirm.com/what-are-the-chances-of-getting-i... 2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
it works out to +/- an accident every 60,000 in a tesla robotaxi with a human operator.
i would calculate it that way to compare it to the last stat i had on waymo which was +/- an accident every 98,000 in an unattended vehicle.
comparing that to a human driver using stats from [0] the “AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety”
page down for maintenance, but summarized at [1]:
ages 16-17: crash every 69,000mi
ages 18-19: crash every 136,986mi
ages 20-29: crash every 182,149mi
ages 30-79: crash < every 303,030mi
ages 80: crash every 231,481mi
[0]: https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
[1]: https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
with that said: unattended vehicles are required to report every single incident no matter how minor or who is at fault. adults might just shrug off a minor contact and get on with their day without reporting or claiming it.
What if another party caused the accident?
they still have to report it.
readily located a variety of news outlets investigating the same question and summarizing that in waymos case human drivers were mostly at fault… even if you ignore stuff that smacks of PR/industry or from waymo itself…
piling on to the flaws in comparing these: waymos operate in major metros that just have higher crashes and claims to begin with. im spitballing with nationwide averages but i think a serious inquiry/research would have to drill into the crash rates for the cities theyre operating in and where each incident occurred.
eg, i live in los angeles and have over 2,000,000 incident free miles out here but ive been hit no less than four times in austin TX and doubt i even cracked 20,000mi there.
I’d be interested in how waymo compares against LA drivers operating in LA…… against Austin drivers operating in Austin. More so than how they compare to all drivers on average nationwide. Without assessing that… say if waymo has a comparable incident rate as Tesla in Austin, youd be overlooking that by comparing a company operating in multiple markets- to one thats only in Austin.
https://www.azfamily.com/2025/05/01/what-happens-when-waymo-...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03/after-50-million-miles-...
> 4 Crashes in a drive of 250k miles. How good/bad is this with human driving?
Most Austin human drivers don't crash 4 times in 250k miles.
“crash”
I will rephrase GP. Most taxis/Uber drivers have less than one minor accident every 250k miles. The fact that "FSD"+dedicated driver have more indicate to me that FSD is more dangerous for an experienced driver in urban settings than nothing.
It's a mistake to compare with the _average_ human driver.
It's reasonable to assume that a seasoned taxi driver will be _better_ than the average human driver. Many serious accidents happen because the driver was inebriated or drowsy/falling asleep, which shouldn't be the case with taxi drivers.
For a proper comparison, we should look at the crash record for _taxi drivers_, not the general population.
Furthermore, if I'm getting an Uber/Lyft I'm likely to choose drivers with a 5-star rating or close to it. That basically filters out all poor drivers. Which means that not only should we compare robo-taxis with taxi drivers, but with the _top rated taxi drivers_.
If true thats seriously bad stat. You buy a car, if you drive even modestly, in 15-20 years you will end up in 3-5 accidents on average. Much worse than me with mildly less kms (0 bad accidents, 1 light, few times avoiding them via quick reactions in complex situations that most probably no current self-drive could handle well if at all, ie hearing car crashes behind the bend and breaking in advance, or few cars behind us and moving a bit further to avoid being also hit in bowling style).
And this is with a driver behind the wheel.
Yeah this article was better – can we just change the link to that one?
It also mentioned that Tesla hasn't registered for a permit in CA, which would require disclosing a lot more (like what you're asking for). Which is telling.
All while Waymo is expanding to more and more cities, including Detroit where it will deal with snow and ice. Waymo is years ahead of Tesla in the self-driving race. It's possible Tesla never succeeds in launching a truly self-driving car.
I think is really interesting how it's often suggested Waymo is at a disadvantage over Tesla due to its reliance on LIDAR and the costs associated with it. But the reality is that it's enabled Waymo to move faster and gain significant more operational experience than Tesla, and that's far more important than front loading with cost reductions in a service business.
Tesla have been operating as a product business, and cost reduction of that product was key to scale and profitability. I completely understand why they have focused on optical sensors for autopilot, lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly, they need to get to market and gain operational experience. Doing that with more expensive equipment to move faster is exactly what was needed. They can worry about cost of building their cars later, much later.
lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
Everything is expensive without scale. But lidar will be very cost effective, when scaled to millions upon millions of cars annually.
And with scale, there are reasons to optimise, reduce cost, etc. Large volumes of sales draws more research. Research to reduce cost.
Self driving is a long game. Decades.
It's already cost effective. Lidar prices have been divided by like 10 in a bit more than a decade. I've read a Wall street story about a SV company that wanted to enter the Lidar market for cars, only to bifurcate to a weird scam and a SPAC when they realized as the prices fell that Lidar would never be a very profitable.
Lidar production costs have already scaled. Now it need more miniaturization (which will help with production costs even more) and something against diffraction.
Oh, yeh, don't get me wrong. I meant impossibly expensive to drop into a mid range car with no scaling up from a higher value lower volume product range first.
It's also quite ugly, not sure you can have it on a convertible etc. - all probably solvable, but not ideal. I can see why Tesla tried the camera only approach but doesn't look like it's working out
> It's also quite ugly
To each their own, but it's possible having sensor bumps on your car become a status symbol that indicates you can afford a private driver.
> not sure you can have it on a convertible etc.
Radically different car shapes are possible when human driving never happens or is very rare. Maybe a small van (like a private lounge on wheels, or a train observation car) with a huge panoramic sunroof becomes en vogue.
> due its reliance on LIDAR
Due to its choice to use LIDAR. Waymo has tested a working system using cameras only, but they choose to use LIDAR because it is safer and does not significantly change cost.
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business
Waymo's roadmap (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXLgzP3gv2k):
1) Ride hailing 2) Local delivery 3) Long haul trucking 4) Personally owned cars
Is step 4 still considered a service? It will almost certainly require a subscription.
The cost for Waymo is the whole car, so Waymo is in it at ~$100k per operational taxi. They are beholden to hardware manufacturers for their product.
Tesla is trying to get in at ~$20k per operational taxi, with everything made in house.
Assuming Tesla can figure out it's FSD (and convince people it's safe), they could dramatically undercut Waymo on price, while still being profitable. If a Waymo to the airport is $20, and Robotaxi is $5, Tesla will win, regardless of anything else (assuming equal safety).
This is just Google doing what they've done for years now: start with the software, partner with hardware OEMs, then build their own hardware. Android to Nexus to Pixel line is one example, Google Now on Tap to their own smart speakers is another (though they may not have hit the third step there yet), and Waymo / Google Maps to self driving is following the same path.
> Waymo on the other hand have always been aiming to build a service business and that changes the model significantly
This isn't the main factor. The main factor is Waymo only does this one thing. Tesla has been: building electric cars and forcing all car makers to do the same; building charging networks; funding and releasing free of charge battery tech research improvements; and doing self driving, and all of it while trying to make a profit to keep running. Waymo is funded by Google, which has infinitely deep ads-spying-on-you pockets. Which is just much, much easier.
> Which is just much, much easier.
Building a self-driving car is more difficult as evidenced by no one having delivered one except for Google. Many companies (including astronomically rich ones like Apple) have tried.
The cost discussion on LIDAR always confused a layman like me. How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge? LIDAR seems to be the only thing that could make sense to me. The fact Tesla does it with only cameras (please correct me understanding if I'm wrong) never made sense to me. The benefits of LIDAR seem huge and I'd assume they'd just become more cost effective over time if the tech became more high in demand.
I'm _way_ out of my depth though.
Lidar will continue to get cheaper, but it has fundamental features that limit how cheap it can get that passive vision does not.
You’re sending your own illumination energy into the environment. This has to be large enough that you can detect the small fraction of it that is reflected back at your sensor, while not being hazardous to anything it hits, notably eyeballs, but also other lidar sensors and cameras around you. To see far down the road, you have to put out quite a lot of energy.
Also, lidar data is not magic: it has its own issues and techniques to master. Since you need vision as well, you have at least two long range sensor technologies to get your head around. Plus the very real issue of how to handle their apparent disagreements.
The evidence from human drivers is that you don’t absolutely need an active illumination sensor to be as good as a human.
The decision to skip LiDAR is based on managing complexity as well as cost, both of which could reduce risk getting to market.
That’s the argument. I don’t know who is right. Waymo has fielded taxis, while Tesla is driving more but easier autonomous miles.
The acid test: I don’t use the partial autonomy in my Tesla today.
Does the "sensor fusion" argument that Tesla made against LiDAR make as much sense now that everyone is basically just plugging all the sensor data into a large NN model?
> How much more expensive is it that it seemed like such a splurge?
LiDARs at the time Tesla decided against them were $75k per unit. Currently they are $9,300 per car with some promising innovations around solid state LiDAR which could push per-unit down to hundreds of dollars.
Tesla went consumer first so at the time, a car would've likely cost $200k+ so it makes sense why they didn't integrate it. I believe their idea was to kick off a flywheel effect on training data.
Holy - okay never mind, I didn't realize just how expensive LiDAR was...
Have they already solved the issue of LIDAR destroying CMOS cameras with its laser?
> lidar was always going to be impossibly expensive for a consumer product.
I just don't buy this at all
>"The new iPad Pro adds ... a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner that delivers cutting-edge depth-sensing capabilities, opening up more pro workflows and supporting pro photo and video apps." [1]
Yes of course the specs of LiDAR on a car are higher but if apple are putting it on iPads I just don't buy the theory that an affordable car-spec LiDAR is totally out of the realm of the possible. One of the things istr Elon Musk saying is that one of the reasons they got rid of the LiDAR is the problem of sensor fusion - what do you do when the LiDAR says one thing and the vision says something different.
[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
Tesla got rid of radar because of sensor fusion, and particularly for reasons that wouldn't apply to high resolution radar. Sensor fusion with a high resolution source like LiDAR isn't particularly tricky.
The iPad lidar has a range of a handful of meters indoors and is not safety critical.
Higher specs can make all the difference. A model rocket engine vs Space Shuttle main engine, for an extreme example. Or a pistol round vs an anti-armor tank round. The cost of the former says nothing at all about the latter.
OK, how about this? Volvo EX90, a consumer SUV on sale now in the UK. Fitted with Lidar.
https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/ex90/article/47d2c9...
They are getting there. But that link has big caveats. Not sure how cool it is to endanger other people’s cameras.
From your linked page:
> Important Use responsibly
The lidar and features that can rely on it are supplements to safe driving practices. They do not reduce or replace the need for the driver to stay attentive and focused on driving safely.
Safe for the eyes
The lidar is not harmful to the eyes.
Lidar light waves can damage external cameras
Do not point a camera directly at the lidar. The lidar, being a laser based system, uses infrared light waves that may cause damage to certain camera devices. This can include smartphones or phones equipped with a camera.
And that Lidar is not assisting drivers and prevously sold US EX90s now need a computer upgrade to get it to work
Tesla's strategy is bad. Build something that works first then optimize.
They optimized for cost first and may never get it to work.
It seems to me Tesla's mistake was over optimism about AI. Musk always seemed to believe they'd have it cracked the following year but it seems to be taking its time.
Exactly, and the Waymo sensors are practically a superset of those of Tesla, so with all the acquired data, then can build models that slowly phase out the need for Lidars.
That's an interesting take. So, classic premature optimization for scale?
Yes.
A normal approach is:
1) Make it work
2) Make it right(/safe)
3) Make it fast/cheap
The surprising thing to me is when you look at Starlink, there was a very expensive blocker there: consumer phased array. Prior to Starlink, I think the cheapest consumer unit was around $50k. That did not stop Musk from charging ahead.
Is there some technological thing about LiDAR that would prevent similar cost reductions? Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
LIDAR has seen many cost reductions as capabilities continue to increase. I don't know the area well enough to speculate how much optimization might be left.
> Or, is it just the philosophical difference over pre-mapping, and not doing so?
It seems to be a "burn the ships" style bet that the Tesla engineers will get to camera-only self driving first without having ever relied on LIDAR. It's equally as likely (or moreso) that Waymo could get there first with better ground truth data from the LIDAR.
>A LiDAR unit, for instance, used to cost 30,000 yuan (about $4,100), but now it costs only around 1,000 yuan (about $138) — a dramatic decrease, said Li. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...
at $138 I'm not sure there's much need to go cheaper.
That's what I've been saying for years.
Waymo can just add the cameras exactly the way Tesla has, and train based only on that information.
Now it has tons and tons of data, they could gradually remove the Lidar on cities that they've driven over and over again. IF driving without Lidar is worth it... maybe it isn't even worth it and we should pursue using Lidars in order to further reduce accidents.
Meanwhile people use Tesla sporadically in a few spots they consider safe, they will always have data that isn't useful at all, as it can already drive on those spots.
--
Another thing, we can definitely afford to have Lidars on every car, if that would make our cars safer.
Imagine if China does a huge supply chain of Lidars, I bet the cost would be very tiny. And this is supposing there aren't any more automation and productivity gains in the future, which is very unlikely.
Lidar production just doesn't have that big scale, because it's a very tiny market as of now. With scale, those prices would fall like batteries and other hardware have fallen with the years.
TLDR: Tesla lost badly
I have no doubt Waymo is ahead of Tesla right now.
Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car? That makes no sense.
Is it somehow impossible for an achievement to be reached by more than one person/company?
Of course not. The hyperbole is not needed, and does nothing but remove credibility from your statement
> Why does it then follow that Tesla will never release a truly self driving car?
Never is a long time, but it's possible that Tesla adopts LIDAR before it gets camera-only to work.
There are all kind of historical technological dead-end examples (e.g. planes that flap their wings).
Of course it’s not only possible but virtually a certainty that an approach to doing anything difficult will be refined, modified and improved as lessons are learned.
Does anyone now care how much SpaceX changed their reuse strategy for the falcon 9? Of course not. It only matters that they found a way that works.
You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?
Ummmm yes. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
>You mean to say a company or person will change their approach, adapt and grow as they learn how to best achieve their goal?
There's nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but it's objectively a different story when the company chooses to turn it into an enormous financial liability. That is a massive practical difference, with extremely pertinent example being Tesla vs SpaceX. SpaceX has had enormous success running a hardware rich testing regime, and they're very willing to move fast and break things... but NEVER with customer payloads. Which is how that aphorism was supposed to be applied. You can and often should be extremely aggressive exploring the entire problem space in testing before you move into final build and then production, but once you're dealing with customers then it has to be done very differently.
Tesla absolutely could have experimented to their heart's desire without making any financial promises let alone actually entering into end customer contracts and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in preorder money for a future feature on ass-pulled timelines. But that's not the path they took, and that leaves them in a much uglier position when it comes to reacting to data and changing their approach because they've already locked in hardware to paying customers. That's the exact opposite of what SpaceX or any normal responsible company does.
There are serious concerns about Tesla even being around in a few years.
They have very large legal issues right now. Legal issues that are going to cost them tens of billions, depending on the legal proceedings.
What legal issues?
They also have $41 billion in the bank…
It would be sad if Tesla or some other entity doesn't compete in the space? I dont want a monolpoly or even a duopoly. Give me 4 or 5 players for true choice and competition.
Someone should have kept investing in Cruise for that. They were basically on par with Waymo, but then GM stopped the funding and shut Cruise down
For a fraction of Musk's bonus he could buy Waymo
What value does he bring to Tesla? or SpaceX? Or any of his other companies, for that matter?
Musk is gonna buy Alphabet? Fascinating.
Alphabet might be willing sell off just waymo.
Has Waymo become successful reaching a critical mass of users yet? If so, they would most likely shut it down based on historical examples. Imagine if they had sold those deprecated products instead. Maybe not a financial significance, but there'd be some interesting products still kicking
Considering Boston Dynamics sat around for like 15 years being a research lab and only started commercializing when they were sold... I'd agree.
Argue with that as you like but Google _loves_ to sit around on good ideas and, in my opinion, hamstring them away from pushing their products to commercialization.
What's the highest revenue product that Google shut down? Maybe Google+? But I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo is already making way more revenue than Google+ ever did, while barely scratching the surface of immediate demand.
was G+ around long enough to generate revenue at all? there was no activity on it that would have been worthy to buy ad space within it. obviously, theGoog had the advantage of owning the ad space just like they had an advantage of converting all G users to G+ users without consent from those users. Even with that, they still had no users
Yeah, I don't blame anyone for thinking Google shuts down products constantly, but to be fair, they're making hundreds of billions per year and the stuff they shut down are almost all little hobby projects that people love, but are a terrible business for them. That's pretty different from shutting down Waymo.
Alphabet is not stupid. They are doing this to be part of the ecosystem.
The same with robots.
Before they sell it to some competitor, they will shelf it and will bet on nvidias autonomoes car platform.
So the idea is a memestock that can't deliver can just memebuy its competitor with fake money?
Pure anti-Capitalist nonsense. Companies fail. Let them die.
They are in completely different leagues, the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
Isn't the lesson from the success of TSLA, that you don't compete on price? That's what made Tesla the first successful EV. Because unlike the rest, they didn't try to compete on price and offer a mass market consumer vehicle. Instead they started with a roadster and then a luxury saloon both targeting the upper end of the market. I don't see the point of a budget taxi car. After all even the human driven counterparts tend to be higher end luxury saloons or SUVs.
Robot Taxis will be competing on price. Whoever can release the lowest cost per mile and most reliable taxi will take lion's share simply because consumers are generally price conscious about transport. Very few will be analyzing the data if two are judged to be 'safe enough', it will come down to price.
Companies like BYD and Tesla are positioned well for that if they can get their AV functionality proven out as both are fully integrated car manufacturers.
Waymo doesn't have in-house manufacturing and is, to my knowledge, purely software so they have lots of vendors along with a relatively low output of vehicles. Their 2025 and 2026 plan is to build 2,500 new cars per year. Each Waymo car currently costs over $100k. Even if Tesla was pushing out Model Ys as their robotaxi platform, they could flood the market very easily in both scale and price per mile _if_ UFSD (unsupervised FSD) was proven.
I did a basic napkin calculation in the other comment. The price of the car is not that relevant per km than you make it to be.
I think self driving will be a commodity in the long term and every car will be able to do it. If Tesla will solve it purly by cameras, every other car manufacturer will be able to add this too. Perhaps a few years later but they will be able to do it too.
So Tesla has to leverage the first mover advantage, and they are loosing this already.
And while Musk says robot taxis are fundamental to tesla, the taxi market is actually not that big. All the broad nice areas like small cities etc. will buy a small fleet of cars and i don't think the price point of a Tesla will that crazy much cheaper than whatever everyone else will have that it will be obvous for everyone to just buy the Tesla model.
I alone will not use Tesla alone for Musk. Despite that, people might want to pay a euro more to have a SVU to have space or higher entry point than choosing the cheapest Tesla model to drive with.
Tesla can't flood the market very easily. If they could, they would have done it. And its expected that Tesla will not suddenly find the solution to their problems. They are optimizing away the next 9 at the 9x% reliability. Every additional 9 will take the same amount as the previous 9. And the nines are quite relevant if you look how many km these cars will have to drive.
Fair point, but here's my counter: consumers won't analyze the data but insurance companies will.
If Americans were price conscious about transport they wouldn't be driving $60,000, 15mpg, oversized pickup trucks to go drop off their kids at daycare and commute to their office job, they'd be riding the bus.
Most Americans don't seem to consider the cost of their transportation in the slightest.
People who use ride share use more than one app because they can pick the one that is the cheapest. The people who use these will be price conscious.
Of course there will be other factors like amenities.
Personally, I think 'style' is going to be a non-insignificant factor to it as well. Few normies will want to get out of a 'nerd car' that has bulbous sensors all over it if they can pay a bit more to have a cooler looking ride, it's the Prius effect.
The style thing is just my opinion though but price will be the major one. People will tolerate an ugly robotaxi if it is significantly cheaper or more convenient.
With ride share you can take the cheap option 99 times out of 100, and then rent a limo for your hot date. And then rent a truck or movers when you need to move something. People buying vehicles usually buy something that covers all their needs, however rare.
> If Americans were price conscious about transport ... they'd be riding the bus.
Have you considered that Americans might value their time differently than you? That might change your equation.
So in other words, they value other things much higher than cost? Gee, sure sounds like exactly what I stated. People care more about other things than the cost, like how cool they look or how much departure angle they can achieve while they drive around in a parking garage. Overall TCO rarely figures into it.
I think other people might be smarter than you give them credit for and (for example) may chose a 30 minute car commute (plus associated dollar costs) over a much longer and multi-step public transportation trip.
They do, but they price it in cost per month.
Finacialization is what made $65,000 cars "cheap".
I assume you mean "sedan" rather than "saloon"?
It's the British English equivalent.
Does that include the cost of a full-time chaperone?
That aside, the cost of a Waymo is estimated to be between $150 and $200k. A model 3 based Tesla robotaxi doesn’t cost less than $20k…
The reason for the cybercab is to produce an absolute bare bones self driving vehicle for $20kish.
Every Google result says below $30k, not $20k-ish, and we all know the reliability of Tesla’s future looking statements. We’ll see.
Cost to manufacture is likely around $25k
LIDAR, like other technologies, declines in cost over time, has done so substantially, and will continue to do so.
Tesla is just on the wrong side of that bet.
Calculate how much a car can drive (200-400k km), then the avg cost of a car (50k vs. 100k) and the avg taxi route (5-30km).
The car itself is a price point of 10 to 40 cent pro km which has impact on the journey for sure but a lot less that it might be the reason.
if you tell me, that i can take the saver car and pay 1 euro more with a 20 euro fair, I wouldn't care.
Nonetheless, economy of scale has happened already at lidar and continues to happen.
If tesla can't get it running properly in bad weather but waymo can, they can also compensate it just by driving at situations were tesla doesn't want to drive.
But hey its just brainstorming at this point as tesla is not close enough to waymo to compare it properly. And while waymo exists, plenty of other companies exist too doing this. Nvidia itself will keep building their car platform which will level the playfield even more.
Whatever market selfdriving cars are, it will be split between everyone and no tesla will not just 'win' this. It will be a race to the bottom for everyone reducing the revenue to a commodity.
> They are in completely different leagues
Agreed. Waymo has a working self-driving vehicle that currently operates in many cities. Tesla has a buggy tech demo in a portion of Austin.
> the Tesla robotaxi vehicle is probably cost 10x less, at least.
Very unlikely. Waymo vehicles also carry twice as many people.
Yeah but, it doesn't work good
This reads like a hit piece. Cars crash, that obvious. Are Robotaxis crashing above or below human-driver rates?
I've been asking for independent analysis for years now. The data is there. Yet all the headlines are from people who have an obvious bias - this is the first where I've seen a headline where there is no evidence that the data has been looked at.
There are many ways to "lie with statistics". Comparing all drivers - including those who are driving in weather self driving cars are not allowed to see - for example. there are many others and I want some deep analysis to know how they are doing and so far I've not seen it.
> I've been asking for independent analysis for years now. The data is there
Independent analysis would be great, but Tesla has been very withholding and even deceptive with its data.
Compare to https://waymo.com/safety/impact where anyone can download the data.
The biggest clue is that Tesla still needs to have a human supervisor in the car. They aren't doing that for show, it's an active admission that the tech isn't there yet.
The rates stated are about 10x higher than humans, and also far higher than Waymo.
well we're comparing waymo to tesla here and tesla is crashing a lot? more than waymo. 4 crashes in 250k miles versus like 10 in nearly 50 million?
From this article, Tesla crashes 50% more often. But hard to compare when one has a human safety driver and the other does not.
> the report finds that Tesla Robotaxis crash approximately once every 62,500 miles. Waymo vehicles, which have been involved in 1,267 crashes since the service went live, crash approximately every 98,600 miles. And, again, Waymo does not have human safety monitors inside its vehicles, unlike Tesla's Robotaxis.
https://mashable.com/article/tesla-robotaxis-with-human-safe...
how is it hard to compare? the company with a safety driver has more crashes. the comparison is easily made in that it makes it even worse
Tesla response:
Everything is caused by human safety drivers making mistakes. It's never the AI.
I think you also need to consider blame and severity, rather than raw crash numbers.
Above human rates for sure. In the 90s in my country, accident rate were 5 for a million kilometer (so 5 for 621371,192 miles), and the rate have come down since.
Basically they are crashing at the same rate as 18-25 years old in the 90s, in France. When we could still drink like 3 glasses and drive.
You just made me think of our PSA.
Was it "un verre, ça va, deux verres, ça va, trois verres, bonjour les dégâts" ? Something like that.
Edit: looks like we didn't have "deux verres", maybe.
And are the crashes leading to fatalities at a higher or lower rate than human drivers?
This is the key. The known instances I've seen are very minor taps / fender benders. Not great, but not fatal accidents
Accountability is a pretty big issue, I think. We've accepted, for better or worse, a certain level of human-caused crashes for 100 years or so. If machines take the wheel they have to be an order of magnitude (or more) better.
Driverless Teslas are the hit pieces. Hitting people. Ayooo.
Seriously though, Tesla has an extension history of irresponsibly selling "autopilot" which killed a ton of people. Because they don't take safety seriously. Waymo hasn't.
Can you expand on a "ton" of people? Best source I've found was this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
But I suspect it isn't comprehensive. It's hard to get good data on this for a variety of reasons.
> Each Tesla robotaxi currently operates with a safety monitor in the driver's seat
This is in the article right below a picture of the safety monitor in the passenger seat…
The picture is likely old, Tesla had to move them to the driver seat back in september.[1]
[1]https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...
As a massive advocate of FSD (and someone who's currently running 14.1.4, their very latest FSD build) it is absolutely in no way ready for unsupervised FSD. It still makes silly mistakes, and the latest build is terrified of leaves and will swerve across lane dividers to desperately avoid a leaf blowing into it's path.
I love FSD, I use it for 99% of my driving, and when it's working right it's an incredibly technology that overall makes my driving safer, but there's absolutely areas of weakness that every FSD user knows it cannot be trusted in under any circumstances and you must closely supervise and be ready to take over at any time.
Seems to be a smear article. Notice the hero video has to do with a fire at a Tesla dealer.
Elon already stopped talking about the robotaxi and is now onto the Optimus bot, which should buy him at least another year or two of swindling investors.
It's a long term R&D project that's been going on for a decade.
HN: No one does R&D anymore. So sad.
Elon R&D: autopilot didn't work out, so everything Elon is involved in is a scam and never works.
Go ahead and dislike the guy, but nobody on the planet has his track record of success and think big.
And he's succeeded over and over and over and over again.
Frankly I don't know anyone as successful in modern times.
Note that his success does not mean I like him, or not. It is simple reality, data.
No doubt, but his ability to deliver has totally faltered.
He also built himself as an ideologue, which has/will greatly impact the ability to attract and retain talent. At the end of the day, Elon is still relying on smart people to execute these projects.
Elon is looking a lot like the amazing artist who had a golden era of great works, and now is killing himself trying to fake his way back to his former self.
The swindling?
We don’t know the details. It could be that the human drivers were in control at the time of the incidents and caused some of them. It could also be that other cars driven by humans caused them.
Web sites hosting these clickbait articles have zero incentive to make things sound less dramatic.
An obvious tell is that they’ll use the word “crash” for a Tesla bumping a parking bollard.
Looks like Waymo just killed a cat. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-2113...
Cats shouldn't be outside. A human driver probably would have hit the cat, too. Heck, my neighbor in his F250 purposefully hits cats and brags about it.
The American fetish with locking cats indoors is extremely weird, and your neighbour sounds like a first class bellend (and the one who belongs in confinement, at best).
Didn't this happen before with a safety monitor on their phone? I seem to remember another Robo taxi company and it hit someone who was crossing the street.
That was Cruise and it killed the entire company.
I believe they're referring to Uber here.
"Uber's self-driving operator charged over fatal crash" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
It feels extremely disingenuous to have a video of burned Teslas (from vandalism) at the top of the article... why do this? Is there any explanation for this except malice? It has absolutely nothing to do with the safety of robotaxis.
Isn't it spicy enough to just report on the safety issues from Robotaxis?
Also:
> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or stationary, one incident involved contact with a fixed object in a parking area. Analysts say this suggests the system's perception and decision-making may not be giving monitors enough time to react, a key issue NHTSA has previously flagged in other FSD-related investigations.
Interesting for sure. This is also what some of the FSD influencers see when they test the limits (especially with parking with small obstacles).
All of the four crashes mentioned are low to no speed crashes.
At least two, to attestation of another person, was because an inattentive SUV hit the back of the car when it was making a left turn. People really want Tesla to not be good at self-driving.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ojjz5u/te...
None of these crashes occurred at higher than 8 MPH.
But yeah, let's not mention Waymo crashing into stationary objects and doing dangerous maneuvers such as cutting opposing traffic off during left turns or making turns from the middle lane despite having like 8x more sensors than Tesla does and pre-trained mapping
Please tell me which Waymos have been crashing into stationary objects.
Waymo hits pole (this one is from 2024, could've sworn I saw one in the last few weeks but may have misremembered): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s
Waymos crash into each other: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mdl5zn/tw...
Waymo cutting off bus at left turn: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1o9accg/wh...
Waymo doing... something... no clue how a pre-mapped car thinks this is ok: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lmq7rl/wa...
Waymo sideswipes firetruck with its lights on: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1mj4w8d/wa...
---
Crashes happen. Tesla is currently having a rash of them but Waymo isn't immune to "wtf how" kinds of crashes even with all of its built-in advantages (far more sensors and having pre-mapping).
Looks to me like a "you might also be interested in..." sort of thing, not something that's supposed to be part of the article. If you're reading an article about Tesla you may also like this video about Tesla.
At the very top of the article? Showing vandalism from 6 months ago rather than all the crazy Tesla news this week (like Elon's "$1tn" pay package, which is equally as spicy).
Again, at a certain point, it gets harder to defend as harmless with the visual of completely destroyed Teslas.
Remember that the purpose of a news site is to make money by driving clicks so they can show advertising. What's more likely to get clicked: a story about CEO pay with a thumbnail of... I don't know, Elon Musk looking slightly disheveled as usual? Or a story about burning cars?
Keep in mind that if their choice of video annoys you to the extent that you complain about how horribly biased they are against Tesla, then mission accomplished as far as they're concerned. That's more people clicking the article and watching the video's preroll ad to see what you're talking about.
> But several of the Austin crashes occurred while the vehicles were moving slowly or *stationary*
Ah yes, the old “crashed while stationary bug”. Hard to fix, that one.
Perhaps Musk is so busy making up shit about what is happening in the UK and trying to foment a civil war there, that he doesn't have time to manage Tesla?
The root of Tesla's problems here is Musk's decision to drop LIDAR.
The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
Humans can do this because we have a very rich well-developed world model that allows us to fill in the gaps. We don't do it perfectly but we can do it decently well.
Modern AIs, or at least the ones small enough to be run on smaller machines that are economical to put in cars, don't have a rich world model like that. They're doing stimulus response backed by a database. That's going to break down at all kinds of edge cases.
The way to compensate for this is to give the car superhuman senses like LIDAR. The car is much dumber than a person but it can perceive its environment orders of magnitude better than a person, which compensates well enough that it has a chance of driving at least as well as a person.
I don't think it is only a matter of building a better world model. CCD sensors work very differently than human eyes and have problems such as over- and underexposure that preclude their use for safe driving in certain conditions. If you were to try driving a car with a VR headset fed from dual CCD sensors into a sunset as in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-full-self-driv... you would get into trouble too.
> The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.
If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only.
I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...
Pretty sure the actual reasoning was that the lidar equipment was in limited supply during the initial covid year(s).