Tesla’s valuation has been spectacular lately, closing at an all-time record of $489.88 earlier this month and still hovering pretty close to that astronomical figure as of this writing. Tesla bulls, notably Dan Ives of Wedbush capital, say this is because Tesla is on the verge of successfully deploying robotaxis, and that Tesla’s stock price could spike to $800 next year.
A New York Times report from Thursday reads like a valiant attempt to talk sanity into anyone who believes the Wedbush Tesla narrative. It’s not going to work, because Tesla is selling a pretty wild fantasy that isn’t mentioned in the Times’ piece.
Central to the Times’ report is the observation that in Austin, Tesla’s proof-of-concept city as a Robocar manufactuer-operator, an estimated 30 self-driving taxis have supposedly rolled onto the roads since June, an absolutely dismal number compared to Waymo’s 200 in the same city since March. The source the Times links to for the Tesla stat is a site called teslarobotaxitracker.com, which is run by an Austin-based robotaxi enthusiast named Ethan McKanna.
And the Times points out that each and every Tesla self-driving taxi with passengers in it still has a human safety monitor—while Waymo’s fleet is unsupervised—at least inside the car.
The Times is far from the first to claim that Waymo is way ahead of Tesla. Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google DeepMind—who shares a parent company, Alphabet, with Waymo, wrote on Twitter earlier this month, “I don’t think Tesla has anywhere near the volume of rider-only autonomous miles that Waymo has (96M for Waymo, as of today). The safety data is quite compelling for Waymo, as well.”
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, replied to Dean by making one of his famous outlandish predictions: “Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. This will be obvious in hindsight.”
One issue with any Waymo-Tesla comparison right now, however, is that Waymo’s business is running into some major potholes, and they might be relevant. This past weekend, Waymo had to shut down its service in San Francisco when its vehicles faltered at dark stoplights. It turned out that Waymo’s lack of safety drivers might have contributed to the problem, since the motivation for the shutdown was a logjam caused by the Waymo software’s high volume of requests for human feedback.
But importantly, the bullish case for Tesla’s Robotaxi service doesn’t seem to be based on the existing ride-hailing service that relies on Model Y cars as autonomous taxis. It’s most likely based on the large scale rollout of a two-seater car without a steering wheel or pedals called the Cybercab that Elon Musk unveiled in 2024, and claimed will be available for purchase by the end of 2026.
The supposed silver bullet for Cybercabs is that people will ostensibly buy them, and use them for their own transportation needs, but at other times release them into the wild as robotic servants that