Tesla Robotaxi Expansion is accelerating fast as Tesla targets Phoenix, Arizona—revealing a bold strategy that could challenge Waymo and reshape autonomous ride-hailing sooner than many expect.
The Captain
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Summary of video:
- Tesla is not yet ready to scale L4 autonomy
- Tesla is filing regulatory paperwork in Arizona and Nevada now, before they are ready to scale L4 autonomy, so that whenever they are ready to scale, regulatory prerequisites are in place.
- Tesla hopes to compete with leader Waymo in Arizona
I wonder when they will start competing with Waymo in autonomy.
By the way, do those gold Teslas have lidar on the roof?
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Yellow - or gold - Model Y’s appear to have lidar installed on the roof. Lots of cars with lots of LiDAR.
I see commentary elsewhere about how Tesla is parking cybercabs in Houston and Dallas. I’m not sure why. I guess they are running out of storage space in Austin
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More high-quality AI content to make us less informed, no doubt.
Although, maybe Tesla engineers should have a look at the lidar?
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Considering that one of FSD’s lingering problems seems to be its propensity to hit things. But then the fanboys immediately say that the reason isn’t because they aren’t detecting the objects.
What they never seem to say on follow through is what the reason is they are hitting things???
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Señor Google digame: Phoenix, Arizona is 518 square miles.
135 cars puts one car about every 4 square miles. Now when I use GPS and am told the destination is “5 miles away” that usually means 8 give-or-take, because “as the crow flies” is not “how the car drives.”
Maybe you get lucky and call one and it’s right next door. Maybe you don’t and it’s 10 miles away. Most likely: they won’t spread them perfectly geographically, so maybe the wait time will be quicker. Sometimes I’d venture the wait time will be longer - much longer.
That will go away over time, assuming the business is successful beyond the novelty or occasional use phase and they put massively more metal out there, but putting 135 cars in Phoenix doesn’t strike me as any kind of competition killer, and at (let’s guess’ $20,000 a copy, it’s a $3m investment in hard assets - not exactly the definition of “asset lite”, which was the original thesis and which supported the lofty valuation for so long.
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But just like here (Houston TX area) and Dallas, and as I noted above, none of these cars are being put into service. It’s like they are being put into storage for whatever year it turns out that they are capable of self driving.
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You misunderstand.
Actually, that puts the problem on the wrong person - because the link above is just AI Slop with a clickbait title that’s probably been A/B tested to death to get folks like the OP to spread it. So, you don’t misunderstand. The video title misleads.
Tesla isn’t putting 135 cars in Phoenix. There isn’t a 135-car fleet going to Arizona.
Tesla has 135 cars in the entire nationwide fleet. Everywhere they are now. 135 cars in the entire country.
All they’ve done is file form saying that they intend to have operations in Phoenix. The video doesn’t say how many cars are going there. It actually doesn’t even say that any cars are going there, in particular. Just twenty minutes of AI generated garbage dialog that says nothing about anything. But it’s got a clickbait title and a thumbnail designed to catch attention…so here we are.
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I personally like the lidars on the Teslas.
Apparently AI associates lidar with robotaxi and autonomy.
I try to avoid posting AI Slop without identifying it as such. I hadn’t checked this one because Tech Revolution has been a good source of data on Tesla. I had grown tired of Tesla Bulls videos. So I just checked:
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It might be Tech Revolution Slop but not AI Slop.
About the click bait, “Tesla’s 135-Car Fleet Eyes Arizona, Waymo’s Home Turf.”
It does not say that Tesla is sending the 135 sized fleet to Arizona. Reader comprehension is required. Goofy had his fun, so what?
BTW, if Waymo is the leader, where should Tesla test itself if not on Waymo’s Home Turf?
God put Adam and Eve in the Eden Paradise, just two people. Now there are some eight billion of us. How could that have happened? Someone ordered, “Have fun and multiply!”
The Captain
Of course it’s AI slop. Did you actually watch through the video? (I sometimes suspect you don’t, because you almost never do anything but post them rather than talk about their content). But if you had, you would have known that this is all just AI generated text.
For fun, I took the transcript and rain it through GPTZero (an AI detection tool available online). 100% probability that it was created by AI. Again, obvious if you watch the video or read the transcript - it’s just twenty minutes of the narrator saying nothing of significance just to get the run time up to just under twenty minutes. Which is the sweet spot for length if you’re maximizing the YouTube adroll for these mass-produced AI longform things.
I don’t know if you personally get anything out of these videos, but they don’t actually have any informational value. They exist only to try to draw clicks from motivated viewers, so they target people with strong pre-existing opinions and try to draw them in with a clickbait headline and thumbnail and content that will appeal to the beliefs they already have. The videos may not disclose that they’re AI generated, but they definitely are.
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Why did it take so long???
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I’m flattered by the attention but this thread is about Robotaxis.
I don’t comment because they speak for themselves. if they didn’t I wouldn’t post them. Tech Revolution is a great source of information about Tesla. Here is another one:
Tesla Giga Press Kills 1,600 Welds: Cybercab in 10s!
Yes, I watched the whole thing. Sandy Munro loves giga castings, as far as I can tell Tesla was the first serious adopter of the technology and now many automakers are following Tesla’s lead.
The Captain
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HAHAHA…what other meaning could they want us to take from this? That is very disingenuous of your post to say that is all on the reader misunderstanding. The words literally say that 135 car fleet is eyeing Arizona. Can you please provide the alternate interpretation that YOU get from this headline?
Boooo…poor form to try to bring the bible into this discussion with the implication that any of those words are real.
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When you send an army to fight, do all the soldiers go to the front line?
Google AI:
In modern militaries, the ratio of frontline combat troops (the “teeth”) to support and logistical personnel (the “tail”) typically ranges from 1:3 to 1:8. This means that for every single frontline soldier, there are 3 to 8 personnel working in roles like supply, medical, intelligence, maintenance, and administration. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Maybe you don’t know that I’m an atheist who thinks the Judeo-Christian tradition has a lot of merit. BTW, I do believe in the existence of gods as memes, not as supernaturals.
Google AI:
Viewing gods as memes rather than supernatural beings fits squarely into the evolutionary concept of memetics. In this framework, popularized by Richard Dawkins, gods are highly successful cultural information units that evolve, replicate, and influence human behavior—making them very “real” in their psychological and societal effects. [1, 2, 3]
You can trace the foundational ideas of this concept back to Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, or dive into the philosophical exploration of cultural evolution in Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
If that is “Boooo…poor form” so be it.
The Captain
In Tesla’s case, the actual soldiers on the front line number about zero.
But the ground is covered many layers over with propaganda pamphlets, with a new story for the faithful in each layer.
Who’s ready for autonomy when we reach 10 billion miles?
(reached in May 2026)
“Roughly 10 billion miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving. Reality has a super long tail of complexity."
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Just one person’s guess which does not look promising.
I have never ever believed that 10 billion miles had any validity as the best guess as to training mileage needed for robotaxis. Next stop 25 Billion? 50 Billion? I think this is one of those cases where there is so little inability to anticipate what many forms that edge cases can take on that there is no way to predict.
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The more milage AI accumulates the fewer new edge cases it finds per mile. This is the reason that live data is supplemented with simulation. But 10 billion sounds like a nice round number of nines so why not harp on it. It’s fun and games that evades looking at stuff that actually matters for investors. 
The Captain
Agreed - it’s a made up milestone that doesn’t matter.
They have all the miles of data needed.
I wonder why the ceo spends important time on it?
Instead of releasing an improved version of FSD (maybe the team has more time since the software has plateaued on HW4), they just released a less-capable versus that works on HW3 vehicles.
I guess to try to limit the lawsuits of HW3 owners who were told:
2016 “All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software”
2019 “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,”
2019 “Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road,” “The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That’s all it takes.”
2020 “All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software.”
Amazing how the years fly by.
2026 “Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD”
A new proposed class action … The suit, Waller v. Tesla (No. 4:26-cv-05350-KAW), was filed June 4 in the Northern District of California and covers cars built with Tesla’s Hardware 1, 2, 2.5, and 3 computers — effectively every Tesla sold with the FSD option from 2017 through early 2023.
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I am harping on it because FSD is far from working even for the family car let alone autonomy with 10 billion miles. Let’s start harping on 25 billion miles now!