Slate’s Henry Grabar takes a closer look at how the two main robotaxi ventures differ in approach and likely effect.
Waymo is now clocking more than 250,000 paid rides a week, on track to double last year’s total. It currently operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, and plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C.—with Boston, Nashville, New Orleans, Dallas, Las Vegas, San Diego, Orlando, Houston, and San Antonio in the pipeline.
Meanwhile, Tesla says it will deploy “full self-driving” taxis in Austin this month, the long-awaited debut of a service that Elon Musk has been promising for a decade—and one that, to his most bullish investors, will soon represent 90 percent of Tesla’s value as a company. The two approaches could not be more different, in ways that suggest different possible futures for what autonomous vehicles mean for society.
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Google parent company Alphabet has sunk billions into the technology, and the business may lose nearly $2 billion a year. (The financials are buried in Alphabet’s Other Bets division.) It costs as much as $100,000 to equip Waymo’s cars with their array of lidar sensors, and further expenses include mapping, maintenance, electricity, insurance, parking, and on-call staff to help pilot the car if it gets stuck. Or, presumably, set on fire—as happened this week at anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.
Tesla is trying something different: A low-touch approach based on cameras and A.I. “The issue with Waymo’s cars,” Musk said this spring, “is they cost way-mo money.” Tesla’s “full self-driving” hardware may cost as little as $400. But its safety is in dispute, to put it mildly. On Friday, Bloomberg published a video of a Tesla in “full self-driving mode” killing a woman on an Arizona highway in 2023. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced an investigation into the company last fall, but U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has seemed less than eager to press automakers on crash reporting, and the version of the GOP tax bill that passed the House would suspend states’ abilities to regulate artificial intelligence.
Certainly, Tesla’s tech is cheap. The question is whether the technology works well enough to avoid the kinds of gruesome accidents that halted its competitors. (The cars must also avoid construction sites, tractor trailers, snow banks, wet concrete, and other hazards of the urban environment.) For Waymo, it’s the opposite: The tech clearly works. The question is whether the cost can come down to make robotaxis profitable—and competitive with Ubers, public transit, and even private cars.
To fundamentally reshape urban transportation, robotaxis have to be both functional and cheap. Currently, ordering a Waymo costs as much as an Uber or more—and the company is largely competing for the same clientele (some data from San Francisco suggests Waymo is eating up Uber and Lyft trips). But without human drivers to pay, it is easy to imagine the service being substantially cheaper. If that happens, we might see a supercharged “Uber effect” like what happened in cities in the 2010s—increased mobility for people who do not or cannot drive themselves, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities. One estimate concluded that we might see 14 percent more traffic if those nondriving groups traveled at the same rates as current drivers. Every trip for which a robot replaces a human driver will come with a lower risk of crashing.
If Waymo’s higher-cost model proves to be the path for self-driving tech, we might see a divide between rich, deep markets that justify its presence—and those that don’t. Lewis Lehe, an assistant professor of transportation systems at the University of Illinois, notes on his Substack that this service will have different economics than today’s ride-hail. You can ride an Uber anywhere someone is willing to drive one, and drivers have different hours (and different wages) in low-demand places. Not so for a Waymo, which will cost the same to deploy in a rich city and a poor town—and see much less demand in the latter. “The divide will beget tropes about the ‘two Americas.’ ” Lehe writes. “Country musicians will never shut up about driving. President Vance will speak for the drivers whom global elites have left behind.”
As with the rise of Uber, this boom will decrease transit ridership and increase traffic congestion. Tens of thousands of full-time ride-hail drivers will struggle with auto debt, while cities try to wield congestion pricing against an adversary with little obligation to share data and considerable power to withhold service for leverage. Unlike Ubers, whose drivers flood the roads at rush hour and sleep at night, Waymo fleets could struggle to meet peak demand—but offer low-priced, off-hours service when there are more vehicles than riders. And while public transit agencies are required to offer paratransit services to people who use wheelchairs, the expectations for ride-hail companies are much murkier—and many wheelchair users report being stranded by Uber and Lyft.
Read on to see what the effect could be if Tesla wins the battle for hearts and minds. I admit, I didn’t consider any of this before I advised not doing business with Tesla. But I’m still comfortable saying not to do business with Tesla. Screw Elmo.
Meanwhile, here’s an update on the preparation for Tesla’s robotaxi launch in Austin.
Tesla is “tentatively” aiming to begin its robotaxi service in Austin on June 22. But leading up to the launch, residents in Southeast Austin are noticing some strange activity from the vehicles.
According to a report by Fortune, neighbors have spotted robotaxi tests in different forms. One neighbor noticed a Tesla Model Y with another Tesla closely following as it circled the same block throughout the day. Others have similarly shared Teslas driving by repeatedly, sometimes with a person in the passenger seat and other times with a person driving the car, or parked in the middle of the road or in front of homes for long periods. The community has even turned to Nextdoor to discuss the activity, with one resident posting, “it’s freaking me out.”
But beyond the repeated Tesla sightings drawing attention, the activity also raises questions about Tesla’s methods. CEO Elon Musk has previously criticized LiDAR technology, the laser-based system that other self-driving projects such as Waymo use in Houston and Austin to perceive objects and other road users. Instead of using LiDAR, radar and pre-mapping that competitors use, Tesla has opted for a camera-only system. Without the more common tech used for self-driving, it’s confounding that Tesla would still circle the same areas. Its approach would seemingly remove the task of mapping an area for months in order to test performance under various road conditions.
“Making people freak out on Nextdoor” is probably not the energy you want to bring to your product launch, but here we are. Have I mentioned that you should not engage with the Tesla robotaxi service? Do not engage.
Oh, and it turns out that Tesla’s robotaxis were supposed to be on the road as of Thursday, but we’re still waiting.
Everyday Texans will have to wait a little while longer for Elon Musk’s inaugural fleet of Tesla robotaxis to hit the streets of Austin.
The world’s richest man has been teeing up the rollout of a paid, self-driving robotaxi service launching in the Texas capital for months, with the fleet set to comprise autonomous Model Y Tesla vehicles. Initially, the robotaxis were reportedly set to role out on Thursday, June 12, according to Bloomberg; now, Musk himself confirmed it’ll be a little while longer for the self-driving vehicles to cruise through Texas.
On Tuesday, June 10, Musk shared on social media: “Austin >> LA for robotaxi launch lol.” When asked by someone when the first public rides will be available, he noted it won’t be this week.
“Tentatively, June 22. We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” he wrote on X. “First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.”
“Tentatively”, says the man famous for predicting that we’d have full self-driving vehicles and be on Mars every year for at least a decade now. We’ll check back then and see where we are.