Tesla started a dick measuring contest with Waymo, and it is losing. The Alphabet company is expanding its service area in Austin beyond Tesla’s recently updated penis-shaped service area.
Waymo is taking a few shots at Tesla in the announcement, too.
Last month, Tesla launched its ‘Robotaxi’ service in Austin.
As we have often reported in the last few months, the service is primarily for optics after years of being wrong about Tesla launching unsupervised self-driving in its consumer vehicles, CEO Elon Musk needed a “win” and therefore, Tesla launched a limited service in a small area of Austin, Texas with Tesla employees being in the cars at all-times ready to stop the vehicles.
The service falls short of the promise that all Tesla vehicles built since 2016 would achieve unsupervised self-driving capabilities, and it’s also not comparable to Waymo’s service, which operates in Austin and several other cities without supervisors inside the vehicles.
Despite the situation, Tesla shareholders are hoping that the automaker is going to be able to scale faster than Waymo and eventually catch up.
They claimed victory when Tesla expanded its service area in Austin this week, but we noted that the expansion, which Tesla intentially made penis-shaped without any practical benefit, did more to illustrate the seriousness of the effort than anything else.
With the joke, Tesla inadvertently start a dick measuring context that it is now losing.
Today, Waymo announced its own service area expansion in Austin and it now covers 90 square miles:
After a successful four months serving riders together, Waymo and Uber are expanding our service territory in Austin – spanning North Austin to South Austin. Starting tomorrow, riders can take fully autonomous rides across 90 square miles of the city, including new neighborhoods like Crestview, Windsor Park, Sunset Valley Franklin Park, and more, as well as popular destinations like The Domain and McKinney Falls State Park.
Waymo’s service area (blue) is now much bigger than Tesla’s (black):
But more importantly, Waymo’s service operates completely autonomously without any supervisor with a finger on a killswitch inside the vehicle like Tesla.
Waymo is well aware of the difference and poke Tesla in its announcement of the service area expansion:
We’re proud to offer the only fully autonomous, 24/7 experience for anyone in Austin, and are excited to offer more destinations across the city – no waitlists or caveats. In Austin, customers have been enjoying their experience, giving their Waymo trips 4.9 out of 5 on average. There are more than 100 Waymo vehicles on Uber in Austin, and that number will continually grow to hundreds over time.
By “fully autonomous”, Waymo means that it doesn’t have employees inside the vehicles. It also mentions “24/7” as Tesla’s service closes at midnight and also doesn’t operate in some weather conditions.
Waymo now serves more than 700 sq mi across the US, and it continues to expand fast.
Electrek’s Take
Waymo keeps doing its thing. It’s going to take some time, but at one point, Tesla shareholders are going to have to admit that Tesla has the same limitations in expanding its robotaxi service as Waymo does.
The main difference is that Waymo is already way ahead as it completed the phase with in-car supervisors years ago and already operates in a 10x bigger area than Tesla in the US.
It also has about 100x more vehicles.
The idea that Tesla will catch up by mid next year, which is what CEO Elon Musk claimed, is completely ludicrous.
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