Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) this morning to dismiss Waymo’s progress in autonomous driving, claiming that the Alphabet-owned company “never really had a chance against Tesla” and that this will be “obvious in hindsight.”
The comment came as a direct response to a discussion about Waymo’s newly released safety data—a level of transparency that Tesla has yet to match.
The exchange started when Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean pointed out the massive disparity in validated autonomous mileage between the two companies. Dean noted that Tesla doesn’t have “anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has,” citing Waymo’s fresh milestone of 100 million rider-only miles.
Musk, who has promised a fleet of “1 million robotaxis” by the end of 2020 (a deadline that passed five years ago), responded with his usual bravado:
“Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. This will be obvious in hindsight.”
In fact, Tesla has zero Robotaxi miles with rider-only as its service still has in-car safety supervisors. Despite the safety drivers preventing an untold number of accidents, Tesla has a much higher accident rate with its supervised robotaxis than Waymo or average human drivers.
Even with this worrying situation, Musk said yesterday that Tesla plans to remove the safety drivers in the Austin Robotaxi within 3 weeks.
Musk’s comment is particularly ill-timed given the context. Waymo just released a massive tranche of safety data covering its operations across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin.
The data show that Waymo’s Driver avoids crashes at a rate significantly better than human drivers, with a 91% reduction in serious injury-causing crashes compared to human benchmarks.
Meanwhile, Tesla has yet to deploy a single vehicle without supervision for a commercial ride or even share anywhere near the amount of data Waymo shares..
While Tesla regularly releases a “safety report”, it was widely criticized by safety experts for being an “apples-to-oranges” comparison. Tesla’s report relied on airbag deployments as a proxy for crashes and lacked the granular injury data that Waymo provided. Furthermore, Tesla’s data covers a system that is supervised by a human 100% of the time, making it impossible to isolate the safety performance of the software itself.
Tesla frames the data as proving “FSD is better than human drivers”, but in truth, if you take the data, it faces value; it only compares “FSD with human supervision to human drivers.”
Electrek’s Take
I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile Elon’s statements with reality. Waymo is currently operating fully driverless commercial services in multiple major cities. Tesla is still testing a Level 2 driver-assist system that requires constant human attention.
Apple and oranges.
We are looking at two companies. One has nearly 100 million miles of documented, driverless driving with specific, published safety data showing it is safer than humans. The other has zero driverless miles, vague safety reports that rely on proxies like airbag deployments, and a CEO who has been promising “next year” for a decade.
For Elon to look at Waymo, which is currently operating the exact service Tesla has been trying to build for years, and say they “never had a chance” is baffling.
To put it in terms that a racing enthusiast like Elon might understand: He thinks Tesla is leading the race because he can see Waymo in his rear-view mirror. What he doesn’t realize is that he isn’t ahead; he’s actually being lapped.
When a car is a full lap ahead of you, it appears behind you on the track. But that doesn’t mean you are winning.
I understand that he believes that Tesla’s cheaper system will enable it to scale faster once it solves unsupervised self-driving, but there’s simply no evidence of that.
If Tesla removes the safety drivers from its fleet in three weeks, as Musk claims, which is a big if, it will officially be about 5 years behind Waymo and will still need to prove safety without a supervisor and then scale.
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