NOTE: This market includes any autonomous ride in a Tesla, not just the robotaxi service!
Waymo claims 700k fully autonomous rides in 2023, which was more than ~0 Tesla rides that were fully autonomous in 2023.
To define fully autonomous, I'll use the following definition:
No human operates any direct controls inside the vehicle like the steering wheel or pedals
No human in the car actively monitors the driving being ready to intervene
Must be of a non-trivial distance (e.g. crossing the parking lot does not count)
Can't be in a fixed track, like the Las Vegas Loop
See also: /JamesGrugett/will-tesla-serve-more-fully-autonom
I will delay resolution until both companies report results or until the result is extremely clear, or until it's January 2028, where I'll make an informed guess.
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I have an awkward question, as someone who's sunk over M$100k into NO on this market. Suppose I personally hacked the in-cabin monitoring and let my Tesla drive me, say, from Portland, Oregon to Berkeley in a couple weeks while reading a book the whole time. Would you be inclined to count drives like that? I presume not but I'm anxious to know how you might draw the line if it's not officially unsupervised but de facto kind of partially is. Because, well, I'm about ready to actually do things like that: https://agifriday.substack.com/p/teslapologetics
However this particular wager turns out, I've shifted my opinion a lot and don't think the YES bettors are crazy. On the other hand, my confidence in Waymo has only grown. I now believe Tesla's new FSD and robotaxis are probably overall safer than human drivers, despite all the ways they fall on their face in non-safety-critical ways. But human-level is a low bar -- not quite enough for wide deployment without supervision until they definitively, provably exceed it. Waymos, as we know from abundant data, are wildly superhumanly safe. Despite the more limited domain that Waymos operate in (11 specific cities so far) I believe Waymos are more capable and safer than Tesla's newest FSD in any domain.
But, again, if both are safer than humans, which I now (tentatively? almost nontentatively) believe they are, we don't really need to quibble about which is better. I'd rather lose my money in this market and see the saved lives.
PS: Ugh, Tesla continues to tease and torment us. The unsupervised robotaxis looked like they were starting to scale up but now they've been stagnant for over 2 weeks:
There are only 31 weeks left in 2026!
@dreev
> Would you be inclined to count drives like that?
Yes
> Because, well, I'm about ready to actually do things like that
Please don't, Tesla has the highest rate of accident than any other brand.
Also, there are some indices than their self-driving system deactivate where there is a high level of danger so they can show it wasn't activated if there is one.
It is hard to explain this statistic if they were really safer than human.
@dionisos Eek, since my life might literally depend on understanding your point, let me make sure I do...
I think the numbers on Tesla drivers is out of date, but still probably true that Tesla drivers crash more than average. I don't think that's due to FSD, in particular not FSD version 14. I think the numbers suggest FSD when supervised does increase safety. Or do you dispute even that? For FSD14?
It's true that FSD (the old FSD?) deactivates before impact, but in Tesla's own statistics, any crash in which FSD was active within 5 seconds is counted as an FSD crash. The idea is that a human not paying enough attention could need up to 5 full seconds to orient themself and get themself into a normal state of attentive manual driving.
@dreev
1. Yes it could be out of date, but I don't find more recent study, if you know one I am interested.
> I think the numbers suggest FSD when supervised does increase safety. Or do you dispute even that?
No, it is what I would expect, when supervised it is likes having an additional pair of eyes on the road, but you were planning to read a book.
2. I don't believe anything Tesla say. But why deactivate before trash in the first place, isn't it quite dangerous ?
when supervised it is like having an additional pair of eyes on the road, but you were planning to read a book
One reason I think this is less bad than it sounds (I admit it sounds bad!) is that it's so hard to stay diligent in the driver's seat. If the car seems competent, you naturally zone out and it becomes quite hard to react to something dangerous with anything like the reaction time you'd have if actively driving. And the better the self-driving is, the more complacent you get and the more true that is. Which means there's less of a difference (albeit still a difference!) between the crash rates for supervised vs unsupervised.
(I've expanded on this in my market on when I'll be able to read a book in the driver's seat of a private car.)
why deactivate before [crash] in the first place, isn't it quite dangerous?
Yeah, maybe the self-driving disengages itself if it sees no way to avoid a crash? But even if the human initiates the disengagement, they may be doing so in order to recover from a self-driving error. So the idea is to attribute all crashes to the self-driving, if self-driving was engaged in the last 5 (sometimes even 30) seconds before the crash. If the crash statistics are favorable for the self-driving despite that, that's promising.
Latest golem-generated graph for Waymo (Tesla's line would still be roughly indistinguishable from zero here):
I think Tesla are saying that Q4 is the soonest we could see FSD unsupervised in private Teslas. If that actually happens and is released widely, maybe Tesla could leapfrog Waymo's projected tens of millions?
@dreev or maybe it'll be Supervised in Name Only, for example if drivers can watch a movie as long as they glance at the road every five minutes: https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2056211646956085719
My understanding from the latest earnings call is that a scaling up of the robotaxi program (and hopefully unsupervised FSD for privately owned Teslas) is waiting on FSD version 15. That's targeted for the end of 2026 or early 2027. The hope for the YES holders in this market is that as soon as it happens, Tesla leapfrogs Waymo almost instantly, given the millions of Teslas already on the road with the hardware to support the latest FSD. (Waymo is at 3k total vehicles.)
But FSD version 15 is a whole new architecture so I think that no matter how good it seems to be when it's first released, the release won't be wide until Tesla have enough data to know there aren't critical regressions.
Which is all to say that I think the correct price for this market is well under 5% at this point.
@dreev even if all privately owned Teslas had the tech for unsupervised FSD, I believe in most/all states Tesla would still need state approval to turn it on, right? If Tesla says, OK drivers don't have to pay attention anymore in CA but CA law still says they do, I think that should not count as fully autonomous for the purpose of this market
@barak Presumably by "still need state approval to turn it on" you expect that the customers can turn on FSD but the state requires this to be supervised not unsupervised? Tesla saying it is now safer than humans doesn't override the vehicle use laws that require at least human monitoring and insurance.
"No human in the car actively monitors the driving being ready to intervene" per rules presumably is going to be a no in situations where the state requires monitoring even if many owners don't feel the need to monitor and actually don't monitor in breach of the state's requirements. Number of such trips might be hard to judge as people probably won't admit to it if it might mean they are breaking laws and are opening themselves up to prosecution. So it is hard to see this counting for this question as it creates lots of difficult measurement issues for resolving the question. Nevertheless it would be nice to get this confirmed. @JamesGrugett
Some states might be fairly laissez faire and not have much regulation while other states like California might have comprehensive applications procedures and analysis to check system is fit for purpose before allowing it.
I expect allowing robotaxis owned by Tesla with deep pockets if things go wrong and robotaxi rider is clearly not to interfere with controls is less of a regulatory ask and this step will occur in most states before considering allowing customer unsupervised FSD to operate.
I can imagine California regulation process taking 6 months after application submitted for robotaxis to be allowed and only then can another 6 month process to allow unsupervised FSD be applied for. So while there might be a few thousand robotaxis in California, unsupervised FSD is much less likely to be possible. Some laissez faire states might allow unsupervised FSD faster than that but if there are only a handful of such states then that would makes catching Waymo in total autonomous rides in 2026 much more difficult.
Hi, it doesn't matter what the law is, this question is about how many self driving rides actually happen. Being legal is probably highly correlated with lots of rides, but it's possible that Tesla could ship an update that makes self driving 100% possible before it is legal for drivers to use it, and lots of drivers start doing so.
It's true this would be harder to measure, but best-effort estimates will be made if necessary.
@fwbt But they are expanding to Dallas and Houston! Oh yeah, right: 1 car in each and by a miracle of coincidence this was just in time for Tesla Earning call. 🤣
@fwbt hard to reconcile this with this reported 3x growth in FSD use by distance, though: https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2047122965351764254 - suggests individual drivers are using FSD to cover 2x more miles on average than last April. Seems weird since surely long highway drives were where it would have been used most in 2025 as well?
@fwbt Last April FSD supervised customers were on v13 at best compared to 14.2 or 14.3 now. So is this showing customers trust 14.2+ more than v13 and hence they have it on for circa double the mileage? So more like last April customers used it only for highway driving whereas now they use it for highway, city and country roads driving?
Some customers might also take a while to get used to it enough to trust it?
On the question I see:
>"No human in the car actively monitors the driving being ready to intervene"
So customer supervised FSD doesn't count and unsupervised FSD? None yet (just the few unsupervised robotaxis) and Elon estimated this as coming q4 which even if that is an accurate timing estimate, it allows waymo to build up a big lead in first 9+ months. Even then I would suspect recent Earnings call comments mean Tesla isn't submitting system to many states regulation of driverless until v15 and the regulation process will then likely take several months for robotaxis and likely longer for customer owned Teslas. Different states are also likely to take different amounts of time to approve the system. So the prospects of Tesla suddenly jumping up to millions of vehicles doing autonomous rides late this year seem rather slim to me.
@fwbt That's believable to me. When it's good enough you use it by default vs not bothering with it. And it got drastically better in the last year (for those with new enough Teslas to get the newest FSD).
@fwbt It's better to sell your shares before the market resolves if it's almost guaranteed no, so just check before 2026 ends or something
FSD version 14.3 is rolling out now, to influencers at least. Elon Musk was only off by a factor of like 2 this time. But it's sounding a little less like the promised "final piece of the puzzle". Elon Musk on Twitter: Upcoming point releases will bring polish and version 15 will "far exceed human levels of safety". Cynically, one could read between the lines here that the current version is not yet at human-level safety, at least not without supervision.
Again, it feels like it's there but this is not something an individual person can tell just by trying it. It depends on how it handles, like, a proverbial black swan darting into the road. For that we need data, which Tesla isn't giving us. The closest we've got is the NHTSA data for the robotaxis, with insufficiently many miles to be sure of much but if anything that points to not-quite-human-level safe. And then Tesla's own data for supervised FSD which looks promising but depends on the disengagement data, which Tesla elides.
But if one wants to be optimistic, none of this is incompatible with the theory that Tesla is level 4 capable and is just being ultraconservative until the data makes a slam dunk case.
It's crazy how close it feels like Tesla is getting when you use the latest FSD on a sufficiently new Tesla (with hardware 4). As I've been talking about in other markets, I just road-tripped 2500 miles in such a car and had to intervene for safety reasons exactly zero times. It was mind-blowing. Elon Musk, not that he has any credibility left, says that FSD version 14.3 will be out later this week. This is the version he previously said was the last piece of the puzzle. And cybercab production is set to start ramping up this month. Plenty of reasons to believe the explosion (the good kind) is imminent.
On the other hand, the Tesla robotaxi program in Austin is still stagnant. Perhaps more tellingly, Tesla hasn't started the permitting process in California. My understanding is that the process isn't particularly onerous. Occam's razor says Tesla isn't ready for the data transparency required.
I do believe that when they finally place that last puzzle piece it could scale up very fast. But now it's April and look at the head start Waymo has:
@dreev I feel the same as a user of the product (and where my bullishness comes from). Took several road trips and had to intervene like 1 time due to gps issue. I could see them scaling up really fast once they feel confident in the technology.