Tesla’s stock (TSLA) surged by as much as 10% this morning following the controversial launch of its ‘Robotaxi’ this weekend, as investors are betting the automaker will now catch up to Waymo’s 6-year lead.
As planned, Tesla launched this weekend its ‘Robotaxi’ service in Austin, Texas.
The launch consisted of a few dozen vehicles equipped with Tesla’s latest “Supervised Full Self-Driving’ software and supervised by Tesla employees in the front passenger seat with their hand on what appears to be a modified door button to act as a kill switch – as pictured above.
Those vehicles offer rides in a limited area in South Austin through an app available only by invitation, which Tesla primarily sent to Tesla influencers on X.
Based on these facts, Tesla is launching what Waymo started to do in 2018: driverless rides supervised by someone in the car.
A year later, Waymo began offering completely driverless rides with no one supervising inside the vehicle.
This would indicate that Tesla is currently about 6 years behind Waymo, provided it can remove the in-car supervisor within the next year.
Despite this evident lead from Waymo, which now offers over 200,000 driverless per week with a fleet of about 1,500 vehicles, Tesla’s stock rose about 10% this morning.
Tesla’s stock is now back trading at over 200 times its current earnings.
This would suggest that investors are betting on Tesla’s ability to catch up to Waymo and expand the driverless ride market by several multiples.
They believe that because Tesla itself has been arguing that:
However, there has been no evidence of that. Tesla claims that its system doesn’t require “expensive, specialized equipment or extensive mapping of service areas”, but the automaker was spotted extensively mapping and ground-truthing its service area in Austin before launching, including using lidar, which is likely what it refers to by “expensive, specialized equipment.”
Electrek’s Take
This is wild. 200 times earnings for completely unproven tech trying to compete with Waymo, which is basically growing as fast as it can in an unproven market.
Yes, anyone can see value in removing humans from the driving equation, but that’s not what Tesla has done yet as supervisors are in the cars and there’s also remote teleoperation involved. Here’s a picture from inside Tesla’s Robotaxi warroom:
Waymo hasn’t had drivers in the cars for about 6 years now, but it also uses teleoperation.
I hope everyone stays safe out there, but I think Tesla is about to be humbled and it will start to understand how hard it is to safely scale something like that beyond a demo for some Tesla influencers.
After this weekend, I see no evidence that we are no closer to Tesla’s promise of unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles, something some of us bought almost a decade ago at this point.
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