Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Tesla’s valuation has been spectacular of late, closing at an all-time high of $489.88 earlier this month and is still pretty close to that astronomical figure as of this writing. Tesla bulls, including Dan Ives of Wedbush Capital, say Indeed, Tesla is close to successfully deploying robotaxis and Tesla’s stock price could reach $800 next year.
A Thursday’s New York Times report reads like a valiant attempt to convince anyone who believes the Wedbush Tesla narrative to remain sane. This won’t work, because Tesla is selling a pretty crazy fantasy that isn’t mentioned in the Times article.
At the center of the Times report is the observation that in Austin, Tesla’s test city as Robocar’s manufacturer-operator, about 30 autonomous taxis have reportedly been on the roads since June, an absolutely dismal number compared to Waymo’s 200 in the same city since March. The source the Times links to for the Tesla statistic is a site called teslarobotaxistracker.comwhich is run by an Austin-based robotaxi enthusiast named Ethan McKanna.
And the Times points out that every self-driving Tesla taxi with passengers on board still has a human safety monitor — while Waymo’s fleet is unsupervised — at least inside the car.
The Times is far from the first to claim that Waymo is well ahead of Tesla. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, which shares a parent company, Alphabet, with Waymo, wrote on Twitter earlier this month“I don’t think Tesla has the volume of driver-only autonomous miles as Waymo (96 million for Waymo, as of today). The safety data is also pretty compelling for Waymo.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to Dean by saying one of his famous wild predictions: “Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla. That will be obvious in hindsight.”
However, one problem with any Waymo-Tesla comparison right now is that Waymo’s business is running into some major potholes, and they might be relevant. Last weekend, Waymo had to close its service in San Francisco when his vehicles broke down at dark red lights. It turned out that Waymo’s lack of safety drivers could have contributed to the problem, since the motivation for stopping was a blockage caused by the high volume of human feedback requests from Waymo software.
But importantly, the optimistic case for Tesla’s Robotaxi service doesn’t appear to be based on the existing ride-sharing service that relies on Model Y cars as self-driving taxis. It is most likely based on the large-scale deployment of a two-seater car without a steering wheel or pedals called Cybercab that Elon Musk unveiled in 2024, and claimed will be available for purchase by the end of 2026.
THE supposed miracle solution for Cybercabs is that people will ostensibly buy them and use them for their own transportation needs, but at other times they will release them into the wild as robotic servants, making it passive, or rather passive, income. This would theoretically benefit Tesla, because it would leverage the Tesla app ecosystem, and Tesla would get a cut, while car owners would have to take care of charging, maintenance, insurance, cleaning, and everything else annoying about owning a car.
And we know that Elon Musk has in mind that he’s going to put something like a million Cybercabs on the road – or at least a mix of hundreds of thousands of Model Y taxis alongside the Cybercabs. We know this because if Tesla doesn’t deploy at least a million autonomous taxis, Elon Musk does not receive his entire famous $1 trillion salary package.
The Times article is not wrong to cite experts saying Tesla is “far behind Waymo.” But it includes passages like this that make the quasi-religious faith in Tesla’s future earnings seem more mysterious than it is:
Some analysts also doubt whether driverless taxis will generate billions of dollars in revenue, as Mr. Musk predicted, or be very profitable. For revenues to reach hundreds of billions of dollars, many people would have to abandon their personal vehicles in favor of taxis, which is unlikely in the near future, said Michael Tyndall, an analyst at HSBC.
It’s not that the Times is comparing apples and oranges. It’s more like they’re comparing otherwise decent apples containing worms to the magic apples of a wizard who claims his apples can grant wishes, but no one can have them yet. This is more dubious and fantastical than the extremely sane adults in the room let on with their appeals to reason. But hey, let’s all wait and see what the wizard has in store for us.
