Returning to one of my pet obsessions.
Tesla’s robotaxi service began in Austin back in late June, and now the brand has undergone its second expansion that has seen it quadruple its initial service area. This new expansion is almost double the size of the original extension seen in mid July.
As first spotted by Tesla fan Sawyer Merritt, the company’s robotaxi service expanded on Sunday, August 3. It saw the service begin to cover more of the south of Austin than before.
Electric vehicle news source Teslarati reports that the brand now covers 80 square miles across Austin. The initial testing from Tesla saw it covering 20 square miles, before an expansion on July 14 saw it move to 42 square miles.
It’s thought Tesla’s biggest rival, Waymo, covers 90 square miles of the city. Joe Tegtmeyer on X, who often posts around Tesla topics, shows the Waymo service on a map alongside its rival. The map shows how Tesla has more coverage in the south of the city, while Waymo’s extends further into the north.
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Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, previously confirmed its plans to expand coverage areas during its latest earnings call. The company said it planned to expand its Austin area by 10 times that of the initial rollout. It didn’t confirm what deadline, if any, it had set in place for the changes.
Tesla rolled out this service in late June and did that first expansion a month later, so they are indeed moving fast. How well they can keep this up remains to be seen. I’m going to point you to a couple of recent articles about how this whole project – which is key to the company’s future success, especially now that Elmo has poisoned the brand name – is going.
From Fortune in an article entitled “‘Elon is gambling’ — How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale”:
But autonomous driving at its heart is a technology steeped in statistical eventualities. How many cars are operating at the same time and how many miles do they collectively log before the first accident occurs—thousands? Millions? More?
Flying may seem like a dangerous endeavor to some, but there is no form of mass transportation safer since 99.9999% of flights land without incident. Companies like Tesla and Waymo now need to demonstrate a similar level of reliability despite variables far exceeding a plane flying through a relatively less crowded sky.
For that you need extensive, detailed data — the kind that [FSD beta tester Elias] Martinez collects with the help of the Tesla community. If you ask the company for answers, though, you’ll get none — just the opposite in fact. Instead of attempting to gain public trust through transparency, Musk’s company is currently pressing federal regulators to bury its robotaxi safety record, claiming the data must remain confidential for business reasons.
“This shouldn’t be proprietary. You’re driving on public roads so the data needs to be made available,” he said. “The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.”
Instead, Musk only releases a quarterly crash statistic for his FSD beta program, now called FSD Supervised: for the first three months of this year Teslas drove 7.44 million miles before an accident. While this is a sterling result compared to the 700,000 miles for the average American driver, these are not robotaxi miles—they rely on drivers intervening before a collision ensues.
And even these figures, Martinez argues, should be vetted independently by regulators before being taken as credible: “If you leave it to a company, they will filter it to fit their narrative.”
And from Timothy B. Lee’s Understanding AI, “What I learned watching 78 videos from Tesla’s Austin robotaxis”:
Waymo’s vehicles are only available in a handful of metropolitan areas. Waymo’s commercial vehicles don’t operate on freeways. And Waymo has remote operators who can intervene if the vehicles get stuck. For years, Tesla fans argued that these precautions showed that Waymo’s technology was brittle and unable to generalize to new areas. They claimed that Tesla, in contrast, was building a general-purpose technology that could work in all metropolitan areas and road conditions.
But in a piece last year, I argued that they were misunderstanding the situation.
“Tesla hasn’t started driverless testing because its software isn’t ready,” I wrote. “For now, geographic restrictions and remote assistance aren’t needed because there’s always a human being behind the wheel. But I predict that when Tesla begins its driverless transition, it will realize that safety requires a Waymo-style incremental rollout.”
That’s exactly what’s happened:
- Just as Waymo launched its fully driverless service in 50 square miles near Phoenix in 2020, so Tesla launched its robotaxi service in about 30 square miles of Austin last month.
- Across 16 hours of driving, I never saw Tesla’s robotaxi drive on a freeway or go faster than 43 miles per hour. Waymo’s maximum speed is currently 50 miles per hour.2
- Tesla has built a teleoperation capability for its robotaxis. One job posting last year advertised for an engineer to develop this capability. It stated that “our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks.”
The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin is a major step toward full autonomy. But the Austin launch also makes it clear that Tesla hasn’t discovered an alternative path for testing and deploying driverless vehicles. Instead, Tesla is following the same basic deployment strategy Waymo pioneered five to seven years ago.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Tesla will scale up its service as slowly as Waymo has. It took almost five years for Waymo to expand from its first commercial service (Phoenix in 2018) to its second (San Francisco in 2023). The best informed Tesla bulls acknowledge that Waymo is currently in the lead but believe Tesla is positioned to expand much faster than Waymo did.
That’s a long article and well worth your time to read in full. I did not know that neither Tesla nor Waymo was operating any of these vehicles at top speeds of less than 50 MPH, which is to say only on regular roads. That’s quite the limiting factor for now. I also did not know that both Tesla and Waymo have “teleoperation” capabilities, which is to say operators who can remote control the vehicles; Tesla appears to be more active in that regard, though there’s no public data on either. The more you know and all that. Read both stories and see what you think. Mashable has more.