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!

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.

Tesla FSD subscriptions are up 51% YoY. Waymo rides per week are up something like 80% in that timeframe (I think they hit 250k in Q1 2025 and 450k in Q1 2026).

Kinda regretting my YES position now.

@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.

Elon Musk has a pet theory that our universe is a simulation that always selects for the most ironic or amusing outcome. My pet theory of Musk-related predictions is that all news and updates are exquisitely constructed to be maximally ambiguous.

(The pinnacle of this with Tesla of course was the launch of the robotaxi rideshare program in Austin with safety monitors in the passenger seats. It was a perfect scissor statement, to use Scott Alexander's term from the classic sci-fi story, "Sort By Controversial". The robotaxis were basically half supervised. Other Manifold markets exploded in acrimony over this and I'm quite proud to have so far navigated it in my own market -- still unresolved but getting close! -- on whether last summer's launch counted.)

Anyway, the news this week is that the new NHTSA data came out and there was only 1 additional robotaxi collision (hitting an object in the road or something; Tesla redacts the details of course, to maximize the ambiguity). So that sounds like an improvement! But simultaneously the mileage for the robotaxis -- the ones subject to this reporting, that is -- seems to have gone down (by how much? haha, we have no idea). In short, the error bars are still miles wide with no ability to tell if safety is improving:

We can also aggregate the 9 months of data we have. Here's Tesla in red, humans in yellow, Zoox in green, and Waymo in blue:

(The variance for human miles-per-incident is wide due to uncertainties like reporting thresholds.)

The one thing we know is Waymo has absolutely nailed this and it's a travesty how slowly they're scaling.

At the other extreme from known empirical facts, Elon says the next point release of Full Self-Driving, namely 14.3, is the "last big piece of the puzzle" and will be out "in a few weeks".

The gaping uncertainty about this actually inspired me to rent a Tesla with the latest self-driving to see if I can get a sense of it for myself: https://manifold.markets/dreev/will-i-have-any-critical-disengagem

RobotaxiTracker is showing the Austin robotaxi fleet shrinking at the moment. Down from 45 to 37 robotaxis and down from 8 to 4 fully unsupervised robotaxis. The YouTuber Dirty Tesla (a huge Tesla fan) went to Austin to investigate recently and was disappointed to see long wait times and a tiny geo-fenced area that the fully unsupervised robotaxis are restricted to.

Maybe Tesla is waiting on the upcoming AI5 chips?

Another week, another half dozen non-updates:

1. As Reuters reports, Tesla seems to be intentionally not moving forward on getting humans out of the driver's seats for their California rideshare service.

2. No scaling up in Austin in recent weeks. Long wait times, and at most a handful of cars with no passenger seat safety monitor. Still driver's seat safety drivers for highway routes. (The California fleet is growing, but, see above, that doesn't mean much.)

3. More NHTSA crash data coming in a couple weeks. I continue to look at the existing data every way I can think of and am finding no rationale in the data for a bull case on Tesla robotaxis catching up to human-level safety, let alone Waymo. The vibes in the Tesla community are another story and it's not impossible that the next FSD version will deliver some more 9's of reliability. It's happened before and just a couple more 9's should do the trick. Those last couple can be a bitch though.

4. That still leaves me at well under 10% for this market since each new version of FSD needs months of testing to know whether the requisite jump in miles-per-incident has materialized. Meanwhile Waymo is projected to hit a million rides per week by the end of the year.

5. But aren't the cybercabs going into mass production? Not quite. Elon Musk is managing expectations by admitting that production will be excruciatingly slow at first. I imagine he sincerely believes, as he has for like 10 years, that the next FSD version is going to be the one that really cracks vision-only level 4 autonomy and so he's just getting all the ducks in a row to scale up the moment that happens. To be clear, I don't think he'll be wrong about this forever. I mean, he might be, I think his brain broke a couple years ago. But even if that's wrong, the probability that this is the year, for any given year, is low.

6. My longstanding prediction is that FSD will live up to its name when Musk relents on lidar, or we get something like a year of additional AI progress, starting a bit before last year's Austin robotaxi launch. So... any month now?

PS: An important caveat on my "longstanding prediction": I didn't think to add the "or a year of AI progress" when I originally made the prediction about a year ago. So you should rightly treat that as cope and if Tesla does pull this off anytime soon, count me as wrong. In fact, let me try to keep myself fully honest by collecting my timeline of predictions:

• 2025-04-25: No Tesla level 4 self-driving without Lidar and radar and hi-def pre-mapping and remote assistance (not to be confused with remote supervision). Definitely not level 4 by the end of August 2025. Most likely the launch just doesn't happen.

• 2025-06-20: It’s feeling more plausible that this will finally happen maybe next year.

• 2025-06-27: The autonomous delivery was effectively a publicity stunt and no normal customers will be getting autonomous deliveries at least through the summer.

• 2025-07-18: I believe (with, um, just barely over 50% confidence?) that Tesla is stringing us along with these controlled demos while they finish getting to actual level 4 autonomy.

• 2025-09-19: I’m ever-so-gradually more sanguine about my at-the-time seemingly cope-addled prediction that Tesla is faking being at level 4 autonomy.

• 2025-11-07: Another possibility is Tesla is yolo’ing it, keeping the total autonomous miles low enough that luck is on their side while they finish figuring out actual level 4 autonomy.

• 2025-12-26: In retrospect in April I should've said either lidar etc or another year of AI progress. No strong prediction but vision-only level 4 self-driving in 2026 is looking steadily less far-fetched. At least it should become clear in 2026 how full of shit Elon Musk has been about this.

• 2026-01-02: You'll be duly impressed if you try Tesla's FSD. The progress is palpable and eventually it's going to happen for real.

• 2026-01-23: I don't think the safety-monitor-less robotaxi rides count as real yet. But if, in 2031, I can't read a book in the driver's seat of a Tesla, I'll be surprised. On the other hand, if Tesla pulls off vision-only self-driving by summer 2026, I'll officially have been super wrong last April.

• 2026-01-23: Conditional on 100 million miles of possibly illegally unsupervised FSD in privately owned Teslas by August 31, 2026, at least one person dies that way.

There is the wrong assumption of the accuracy of crowd robotaxi counts BUT only 139 out of 200 Waymos counted in Austin with same methods. At least 30% undercounted. Harder to find robotaxi (Waymo-Tesla) in the SF Bay Area. 67 Waymos counted in SF Bay Area out of 1000 Waymo claimed. I believe the main mechanism if bothering to submit the license plate of the ride you got by less than 1% of the customers. No Tesla employees will submit license plates of tesla employee robotaxi fleet. Waymo license plate count is below the words VEHICLE FLEET.

So Robotaxitracker.com massively undercounts claimed Waymos BUT people think it has a good count of Tesla Robotaxi?

Tesla has registered and filed paperwork for 1655 robotaxi in December 2025 for SF Bay Area. They must have set aside or are using those cars with license plates. They have filed paper work for 798 drivers for SF Bay Area. There are hundreds of drivers and cars giving employee rides which would not get reported in the counts.

Tesla said 500+ robotaxi in Jan 2026 where lying on the earnings call can get them sued. Evidence supports that there are now 1000+ active robotaxi (~800 SF Bay Area, ~200 Austin and 200+ Employee rides) but count fails like counts huge misses for Waymo. There are 2000+ set aside or active robotaxi. 1655 at least in SF Bay Area, 200-300+ Austin inferred by miscounts, 100-200+ cybercabs in factory.

@brianwang please put limit orders

I love this market. Can somebody place large orders on YES?

@MachiNi order to win 50k up for a limited time. 🤣

@ChristopherRandles lol