We know from Tesla’s current lack of L4 vehicle autonomy that they haven’t demonstrated meaningful capability and reliability.
Here are specific reasons to doubt their near-term (2026, 2027, 2028) technical ability to achieve meaningfully in-house L4 vehicle autonomy.
- Tesla lost substantial senior talent over the last several years.
- From Waymo’s autonomous vehicle (AV) rollout we have evidence that multi-sensor works, but there is no such evidence for camera-only/mainly sensor configurations (Tesla’s approach).
- Other AV competitors, beyond Waymo, are mostly multi-sensor.
- There is a high probability that Waymo evaluated camera-only and determined multi-sensor is the better first pass design. They have subsequently reduced their sensor count in newer generation hardware.
- We can assume Tesla is at least one order of magnitude away from human or better safety levels (accidents per 1 million miles). Data on scaling laws from Waymo suggest diminishing returns to safety improvement with each 10x increase in compute power (and model parameter size), and Tesla would take at least one year to iterate a large software (and maybe hardware) version change (eg, software v13 to v14, and next to v15).
- If we just extrapolate Tesla’s recent historical improvement in safety, they have at least a year or two to go to get to human safety or better.
- No California AV testing by Tesla is happening, suggesting their safety level is not good enough for them to feel ok about disclosing it to the public.
- Tesla needs at least 20 million L4 autonomous miles to start to statistically demonstrate human level safety. This will take time and they haven’t meaningfully started. Waymo has passed 200 million autonomous miles.
- Tesla has admitted that a prior vehicle hardware version, HW3, cannot support unsupervised driving software. There are strong indications that the capability of the latest hardware, HW4, has plateaued and also will not achieve autonomy at better than human safety. This would mean that the next generation, HW5, or an even more advanced version, will be needed to deliver autonomy. HW5 is in the process of being manufactured and is likely at least a year away from being used in any meaningful quantity.
- More advanced sensors (eg, automated cleaning) have been seen in Tesla’s robotaxi fleet, but not in customer vehicles, suggesting additional hardware changes beyond more advanced chips are needed for autonomous driving to handle various environmental conditions (water, dust/dirt, ice, etc). It will take additional time to develop, test, and manufacture this additional hardware.
Tesla could partner/acquire the needed technology, which is a different path that could help overcome some of the above doubts.