If that’s your benchmark, congrats. Waymo will continue to be ahead of Tesla for another year at least, but 24 months from now, my money is on Tesla pulling ahead.
Tesla’s approach is different because:
- Tesla’s approach was to work on autonomy world-wide first; Waymo’s was to first work with a specific type of special vehicle in a specific geo-fenced area on specific types of roads.
- Tesla uses cars that are ¼ the cost of Waymos.
- Tesla already mass produces those cars, heck they’re the world’s most popular car. Not EV: car.
- Tesla claims they don’t need to create nor maintain HD maps everywhere they want to go.
- It’s been a long time coming for Waymos to operate on highways. Do you think Tesla will take years to have that ability in its robotaxis?
- Tesla can more easily move from a robotaxi business to a autonomy for personally owned car business than Waymo.
The last item could be huge for profits.
As for who’s ahead, one has to understand what their end-games are and what their approaches were. If Waymo were to now try to operate without LiDAR, how many years would that send them back? And if they don’t, that limits their ability to move their tech into the market for personally owned vehicles. Heck, how does one mount a LiDAR unit on top of a convertible car?
And it’s early days (literally) for Tesla. The coming months will show us whether Tesla’s approach enables faster scaling than Waymo or not.