Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.
I recently wrote about the latest updates to the long-running Tesla vs. Waymo battle. However, I missed some things! Plus, I completely forgot about a pretty wild claim Elon Musk made earlier in the year and therefore missed adding an update on that as part of this discussion.
Waymo vs. Tesla, Episode 237
For a little backstory, Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind & Google Research and Gemini Lead, wrote the following on X and posted a little graphic on Waymo’s superb safety record:
“Waymo’s system, fueled by careful collection of a large volume of fully autonomous data, is the most advanced, large-scale application of embodied AI today. Very proud to see this level of engineering rigor tackling safe autonomous driving making the roads safer for everyone (and it has been nice to see various Google research collaborations with Waymo be a part of these advances!).
“The insights here are foundational for how we design and safely scale all complex AI systems.”
A Tesla fan then wrote, “I would be interested to see your arguments compared to Tesla who also claim to be the most advanced large scale application of embodied AI.”
I wrote about Dean’s initial response (the link at the top) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s response to him. However, Dean made another comment that I missed until just now. He wrote, “Tesla did report in April that they have accumulated 50,000 miles driving cars from the end of the factory line to the outbound logistics lot in their factories in TX and CA.” He also reposted a Tesla post on X from April:
I think there are two ways to take this. One possibility is that Dean was trolling and belittling Tesla there by pointing out that Tesla had only ~50,000 driverless miles logged earlier this year whereas Waymo has nearly 100 million. (His other response said “I don’t think Tesla has anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has (96M for Waymo, as of today). The safety data is quite compelling for Waymo, as well. For more details, see: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ ”
The other possibility is that, in very much of a scientific, non-emotional way, Dean simply tried to find how many driverless miles Tesla had logged and found that, so he shared it.
Naturally, many Tesla fans are eager to point out all of the miles FSD has been active with a driver supervising. Both points have some validity. Naturally, there’s a huge difference between actually deploying driverless vehicles and having a very advanced Level 2 ADAS in widespread operation in which human drivers are liable for anything that happens. The argument for the latter is that the technology is progressing and FSD is nearly at a true self-driving level. And, of course, the argument is that it’s quickly approaching a tipping point and then Tesla FSD’s driverless miles will fly past Waymo’s. We will see. Both sides believe they have the better tech and will win in the end.
Tesla Robotaxis Covering 50% of the USA!
Okay, on to the fun. So, in July, during Tesla’s 2nd quarter shareholder conference call, Elon Musk made this bold forecast:
“I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” Musk said. And upon further reflection, he didn’t step back and get a little more cautious in his expectations, but doubled down. “Assuming we have regulatory approvals, it’s probably addressing half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year.”
Welp … we are far from that happening. In fact, 0% of the US population has truly autonomous Tesla ride-hailing. Maybe Tesla will reach that 50% milestone in 2026. Who knows? But what we do know is that Elon Musk’s forecast for this is 100% wrong.
Of course, after a little while, like with most things, Musk realized his statement was totally wrong and Tesla wouldn’t be blanketing half the country with robotaxi access. However, even by the October Tesla shareholder call, Musk was overly ambitious about the 2025 rollout. His forecast had shifted to this: “I think, about eight to ten metro areas by the end of the year.” (Tesla robotaxis currently serve riders in Austin, but with a human safety monitor onboard, and Tesla employees in San Francisco, with human safety monitors onboard.) Frankly, one has to wonder how Musk can be so wrong so consistently about the thing he is supposed to know the most about, about the thing he is supposed to be the global expert on. One can’t blame Dean for not taking Tesla entirely seriously when Musk has made these kind of absurdly false forecasts for about a decade. Perhaps Musk is “the boy who cried wolf” on this topic, but we should also remember that a wolf did eventually come in that fable — but no one believed him in that crucial time because of all the other tricks and lies.
Tesla has just started deploying vehicles without human safety monitors in the car. Some people claim these are still remotely operated by humans to avoid crashes. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I would not at all be surprised if it is, and I wondered about that even before readers brought that up. If that is the case and the humans do need to intervene, I think we’re much further away from a big fleet of self-driving Teslas than Tesla fans/shareholders think. But, like I said, I have no idea how much humans actually need to intervene in the driving of Tesla’s latest FSD technology.
What Tesla has is millions of vehicles on the road with the same hardware as the robotaxi vehicles that are operating in a semi-driverless way. If Tesla ever gets the software good enough, in theory, it can turn on true self-driving capability in those vehicles for anyone owning them. Perhaps the most interesting question is not when Tesla will do this, but whether Tesla will do this prematurely and numerous accidents will occur as a result — and where the world will go from there.
Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Advertisement
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
[embedded content]
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
Share this story!