TLDR: Since Tesla’s June 2025 robotaxi launch, Tesla has built a 39-vehicle unsupervised fleet, while Waymo has a newly disclosed 3,791-vehicle U.S. fleet. So Tesla appears to be on pace to catch up with Waymo’s autonomous fleet size by the year 2111.
LOL!
I’m fine with that timeline. The rollout in Austin hasn’t been the smoothest – though in faiirness, we now have so many Waymos in town that they keep having issues like knowing what to do when encountering an emergency vehicle. They aren’t going around killing people, but that’s a pretty low bar.
That is already a massive improvement, as the actual minimum for autonomous vehicles is just “kill fewer people than human drivers”. Waymo has 200 million miles driven, which means they should have killed three people already.
Even on non-lethal accidents, Waymo generates something like 12x fewer.
I think that tech will be the automotive equivalent of the polio vaccine. Dying in road accidents will become akin to dying of rabies, a freak accident of extreme rarity. Probably, so will driving cars with no autonomous capabilities.