Tesla announces that it increased the size of its Robotaxi fleet by 50%, but it never confirmed the original fleet size.
It appears Tesla was only operating about 20 vehicles in its “robotaxi” fleet so the number likely only rose to about 30 cars.
In late June, Tesla launched its ‘Robotaxi’ service to paying customers under an invite-only program.
We have warned that the launch of Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ is more about optics, giving the impression that Tesla is leading in autonomy, rather than advancements in deploying a safe autonomous ride-hailing system.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been making predictions about the automaker solving unsupervised self-driving by the end of every year for the last 6 years, and it never happened.
He and Tesla badly needed a win to save face, as Waymo is now rapidly expanding its own autonomous ride-hailing service across half a dozen US cities.
To give the impression that it was also ready to deploy such a system, Tesla took a similar approach to selling self-driving technology in consumer vehicles – namely, doing it before it is ready.
Tesla began offering a ride-hailing service in Austin, utilizing vehicles equipped with an updated version of its consumer Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology. Instead of Tesla owners being supervisors and responsible for the cars like in the consumer version, Tesla installed employees in the front passenger seats with their fingers on a kill switch, ready to stop the car at any moment.
To give the impression that it is scaling faster than Waymo, Tesla quickly expanded its Austin service area to become bigger than Waymo’s.
However, it didn’t expand its fleet of Robotaxis, often resulting in wait times of more than 20 minutes to get into a vehicle.
This week, Tesla expanded its service area again to include its local factory and finally announced an increase in the number of cars in the fleet:
The problem is that Tesla never confirmed the initial size of the fleet in Austin. The automaker is purposely keeping this vague by mentioning a percentage increase rather than a new total number of vehicles in the fleet.
The best-supported baseline is 15 to 20 vehicles, based on initial images from the Robotaxi control room and sightings of cars, which would result in a maximum of approximately 30 vehicles in the fleet now.
In comparison, Waymo is already operating more than 100 vehicles in Austin.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla shareholders are celebrating this as a victory: ‘Tesla is scaling faster than Waymo in Austin’, they claim.
This is a fallacy. There’s a big difference between the two here.
Tesla can expand the service area rapidly, as it doesn’t operate a fully autonomous driving system in the Robotaxi fleet. It’s still very much a supervised system, and the bottleneck is the supervisors; hence, why Tesla operates only a small fleet, about one-third the size of Waymo’s.
Waymo ensures that its system operates autonomously without requiring supervisors in the vehicle before welcoming paying customers and expanding in a specific market, such as Austin.
In short, Tesla is doing this to give the impression that it is competing with Waymo, but the truth is that they haven’t even started competing. Once they can drive autonomously without supervision, that’s when the race begins, and Tesla is already about 5 years behind on that.
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