Tesla's Robotaxi is up against stiff competition

TSLA‘s only edge is that US is a protected market. Won‘t be justifying the trillion $ valuation for much longer.

While we don't have any autonomous vehicles in my city, I'd happily try a Waymo. I would never get in a Tesla robotaxi. I have FSD (on hw3 mind you) and I don't even use it when I'm in the drivers seat... you could not pay me to sit in the back seat and let the car drive itself. Seriously, if you offered me $10k I wouldn't do it. What good is $10k if I end up dead?

There are multiple companies operating/testing vehicles with no backup driver in the USA. I believe that Tesla is not one of them.

There's a lot of self driving schemes that are ramping up in the US at the moment. TSLA's edge is that its head of marketing keeps promising the next big thing before the current big thing fails. So just as TSLA is now valued for making its current cars self driving and not for the cars themselves, next year once its clear HW4 isn't good enough it'll be valued for robots and HW5 and not for the cars currently on the road.

I’m gonna be honest with you; I don’t even know if Tesla is in the competition.

there was just that one video of a tesla car self-delivering to a nearby owner from the factory in TX. Though that's not a robotaxi, but that counys as "operating vehicles with no backup driver" on public roads (important addition since on private land the pool of contenders vastly expands and also does include Tesla)

So one fully autonomous trip, without passengers, in over a decade of trying, while Waymo is now doing a million autonomous passenger trips per month. Tesla isn't just facing tough competition, they're not in the competition yet.

Also, if it's so reliable, why was there only one?  Seems like a no brainer to save money and for PR to do it all the time.  Given the multiple instances of vids we know for sure that Elon faked, it's hard to fully trust that one

If there was a list, they would be labeled under "other."

I agree they are no contenders to waymo, but I was just addressing a specific point of "operating/testing vehicles with no backup driver in the USA". Was it PR move? absolutely, Tesla is really big on PR. But did it happen? Yes it did.

We have absolutely no information to conclude that the stunt of delivering a Tesla from the factory to a local customer was anything more than a trip remotely controlled by a Tesla operator.

[https://teslafsdtracker.com/](https://teslafsdtracker.com/) shows that teslas can go around 400 km of self driving before failing, and if its a particular route that is known to work well with FSD then it should be fine to do that delivery. The problem is 400km is only 0.1% of the way towards the 400,000 km a human taxi driver goes on average before having a crash.

Once again, there is no information to conclude that Tesla can deliver or has ever delivered a vehicle without remote operators.

We don't and I never said we did. But it was a car with nobody inside which matches the claim made by the person I replied to.

What competition? I cannot order a driverless Tesla. I can do so for Waymo. The marathon had started. Tesla is still doing stretches at the starting line. Let’s talk when they actually start jogging like a senior citizen with arthritis in their knees.

When tesla turned on FSD when they were running a trial, I immediately disabled it and told everyone else with a driver profile on the car that elon just enabled suicide mode on the car if they try to use cruise control. It was really shitty of them to do that, especially when its a GD beta and their sensors suck ass.

I'm using FSD daily and love it. There is room for improvement for sure but it works great as is.

Tesla's biggest competition is with reality.

That's cold man. True but so brutal.

I have always wondered how many attempts it took to pull that one delivery off. The fact they only announced it after the fact suggests they were not confident enough to announce ahead of time and there may have been many failures before. The fact they haven't managed a repeat suggests it cant be done reliably.

Ya.. plus there was wierdness around it. They took a pic after and there was like 30 employees.. so obviously a caravan on all sides.. and I remember seeing the guy that got the delivery's social media accounts were all like 2 days old at the time of delivery.. speculation that it was a Tesla employee

The backup driver was remote. Tesla's statements were carefully worded to say to there were no interventions, not that it wasn't being remotely monitored.

There was a remote operator, but the operator did not intervene, according to Tesla. Impressive, but I don't think it counts as autonomous unless there was no remote operator.

Spot on. I counted 28 people in the picture. Presumably you'd need fewer as you roll it out, but they've only made one delivery total. Which says to me that's about all they can make.

there's no contradiction here. The original statement was about drivers in the car. there were none.

I totally got to try one when I was in Phoenix. The uber app basically said “hey, wanna try a robot?” So we did and it was terrifying and amazing, and by the end of my weekend there, I didn’t even look out the windshield anymore. Best uber or taxi experience of my life was a Waymo.  It linked with my phone, ID’d itself with my initials so I knew which one was mine, the stereo was already playing my Spotify playlist when I got in, etc.

This post doesn't make sense. What competition? Tesla doesn't have a Robotaxi, so how can they compete with a Robotaxi for Robotaxi things?

The original statement was "no backup driver." Not "no backup driver in the car."

you are right. I guess it was just my liberal reading of that because if you mean "no backup driver at all" that's very nebulous. There are monitors overlooking Waymo cars and such and they could be portrayed as backup drivers by some people at least.

They had kill switches in cars behind it, almost certainly, and probably did it dozens of times. Wasn't a robotaxi either.

~~Robo~~Remotaxis

it was a PR stunt for sure. The proof is in the number of times they did it ;)

let me know when Tesla is actually competing. Last i checked they only had 15 cars, with safety observers required, and only a handful of sycophants invited to test rides.

Hahaha

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I have taken multiple rides in Waymo (I live in west Los Angeles). The first time i was a little apprehensive, but after that I was quite comfortable with it and just get in and read my email until I arrive. The Waymo software represents to the rider as a very careful and conservative driver. Those cars are loaded with all kinds of sensors. Having owned two Teslas myself and having experienced a lot of the glitchy things that Tesla "autopilot" does - whether with sharp curves or fog or sudden transitions from light to dark or phantom braking and so on, I remain skeptical about Tesla robotaxi. But happy to be proven wrong. I wouldn't ride in one though until they had established the kind of track records for rides and safety that Waymo has.

There is a subtle but key difference. When Waymo encounters a situation that it can process it will alert an operator who will propose a solution but does not actually control of the car. If that doesn't work, or in certain circumstances the operator will operate the car remotely. But the cars aren't being monitored full time. Tesla requires a operator monitoring the vehicle full time.

While I agree there is a big difference, the degree to which Waymo cars are monitored is not fully understood (it's not like the Tesla case is fully understood either of course) and potentially differs from car to car as well depending on a number of factors. As such there's no shortage of (mostly Tesla apologets? at least those ar the ones I see pushing this idea) people that would scream from the hill tops how waymo has remote drivers too. Moreover if we want to get really semantic - tesla cars are not monitored full time either - e.g. when they are charging or are otherwise parked overnight they are most likely not monitored too. With all this in mind I am not sure we need to keep digging that rat hole any deeper?

It is more what they didn't say. They said there were no operator in control at any point. They didn't say there was no operator. Which I'm sure they would have said if it were true.

Tesla’s robotaxi will have stiff competition, if Tesla ever has a robotaxi

Tesla’s only edge is having a CEO who is immune from securities fraud regulation. Allowing investors to engage in enforcement arbitrage

You are 100% right on that. If Tesla had to compete with BYD, et al, they'd be dead. Fortunately for them, the law banning Chinese EVs from the US market isn't likely to change.

As far as I know we have literally never had a case of a Waymo being remotely driven. They only added the facility recently and their description made it sound like it was only usable in some pretty extreme circumstances (best hypothesis I've heard is that it's for driving the car out of an accident scene and onto the shoulder after a freeway crash). Waymo's remote team in normal operation can't do more than give hints to the Waymo driver about what's going on (e.g. "use this lane even though you think you can't, it's fine", or "it's safe to go over the sidewalk over here, despite normal rules"). I agree with sykemol that the difference between what Waymo does continually every day, and what the Tesla delivery did in that one cherry-picked demo video, is significant in a way beyond mere semantics. We also see this with the Tesla robotaxi. As far as I'm aware, we've never seen a case of the car itself calling for help. Only the safety monitor aborting the car and calling for help. This is a key difference. Waymos can recognize when they're in trouble. It's not clear that Teslas can. Until they can, to OP's original point, they aren't even competing in the same game.

This post is about robotaxi service, not driver-assist services.

> As far as I know we have literally never had a case of a Waymo being remotely driven. it was covered in AMA years ago as an option (but not like an RC car remote driving, no). > Until they can, to OP's original point, they aren't even competing in the same game And I fully agree here. Tesla does not even have a robotaxi offering as far as I am concerned. Is it open to the public and can I fly to Austin and get ride? No! It's reserved to employees and contracted PR personnel under NDAs.

Here's why melon downplays lidar all the time. Waymo already does that and if he were to do a metoo, then investors would be hesitant to bet on him. So instead he makes up shit and promises nonsense. Seems to be working

His other competition is an agency that has been defunded for decades and so he burns money to land rockets and investors now think he's some sort of genius.

Which they've already done for robots which don't work as a stunt. And well they erase crash data and lie about FSD being active during crashes, so what's not to trust?

\>according to Tesla That's a keen track record. Maybe they'll get lawyers to bail them out again if they're caught lying.

It isnt up against any competition because it doesn't actually exist.

You know who else autolands rockets? [Joe Barnard](https://youtube.com/@bpsspace?si=jIXb5teu2BzIS017). Now not as big, but on scale a lot less money. Next up is a suborbital launch. No NASA tit to suck off, either

I saw a Waymo test driving about a mile from my house (two in the front seat) so I may be able to Waymo in a few months. But Tesla will still be driving the choosen few around about four square miles

The only meaningful competition is from humans driving cars. Ride share services provide around 2 BILLION trips per week in the US. Waymo service covers **\~0.00001%** of the US area.

What competition? Waymo offers driverless cars to the general public. Let’s wait until Tesla does the same before having a discussion.