Waymo has been doing fully autonomous drives for a while now, and Tesla too seems to have hit that milestone.
Tesla is testing out Robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas with no driver inside the car. Thus far, Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet had a safety driver. “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X in response to videos of these driverless cars being spotted around Austin.
Ashok Elluswamy, who leads AI at Tesla, also indicated the move was significant. “And so it begins!” he posted on X in response to a video of a driverless Tesla being spotted in Austin.
Austin is the first city where Tesla has tried out self-driving with no safety monitor. Tesla has been testing out its self-driving cars in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Austin. These cars largely drove themselves but had a safety driver, either on the driver’s seat or the front passenger’s seat. Tesla now seems to be sufficiently confident in the car’s ability to have it drive without the safety driver.
Waymo, of course, has been running such fully autonomous cars for a long time in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, and plans to have autonomous operations in 10 cities in the next few weeks. This was alluded to by Google’s Jeff Dean, which prompted a response from Elon Musk. “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,” Dean had posted on X. When promoted by a user to share his thoughts on Tesla, Dean had pointed out that Tesla’s cars had support drivers. “I don’t think Tesla has anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has (96M for Waymo, as of today). Many of Tesla’s rides currently have a safety driver at the wheel, and thus can’t be considered “rider-only”,” he had added. Musk had then shot back a response. “Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. This will be obvious in hindsight,” he had told Dean on X.
Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving systems differ in a crucial way — Waymo relies on LiDAR, while Tesla’s cars rely only on cameras. This has meant that Waymo has had a much faster rollout than Tesla, but Musk is betting that once his cars collect enough data, their camera-only approach will prevail in the long run. Andrej Karpathy has also alluded to this, saying that Waymo will have early gains, but Tesla’s approach will be more scalable if it works. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi too has said that in the near term, Waymo’s LiDAR enabled approach is more viable than Tesla’s camera-only approach. But with Tesla testing out fully autonomous rides, it could be on the verge of a broader self-driving rollout. And if Musk is right, Tesla could end up scaling much faster than Waymo in the coming years.