4 ms·

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware c

by kjksf 8mo ago

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla. And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

g947o 8mo ago
> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.
dinobones 8mo ago
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
- llboston 8mo ago
  According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
  - DerekL 8mo ago
    Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robotaxi-safety-monitor-it-just-moved-them-to-a-trailing-car/ https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
    - WarmWash 8mo ago
      It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?). However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.
      - senordevnyc 8mo ago
        So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated. Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.
      - small_model 8mo ago
        Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.
        senordevnyc 8mo ago
        This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices. Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.
        WarmWash 8mo ago
        The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.
        small_model 8mo ago
- testing22321 8mo ago
  > and there won't be, for years, if ever. That is a lot of confidence. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? What makes you so certain?
  - UltraSane 8mo ago
    Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.
    - red75prime 8mo ago
      Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them. I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.
      - UltraSane 8mo ago
        FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
        red75prime 8mo ago
        Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
        8mo ago
- small_model 8mo ago
  lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
  - senordevnyc 8mo ago
    Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…
  - youarentrightjr 8mo ago
    > lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year. A year? They'll be gone in two weeks! Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
    - small_model 8mo ago
      None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
      - youarentrightjr 8mo ago
        > None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge. That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile". With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages. History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
gcanyon 8mo ago
> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have. > didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.
- dmoy 8mo ago
  I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but > If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion. That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
- testing22321 8mo ago
  If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
  - kiba 8mo ago
    They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
  - bradleyjg 8mo ago
WarmWash 8mo ago
Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.
bobsomers 8mo ago
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.
UltraSane 8mo ago
Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.
throw-qqqqq 8mo ago
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures. Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number. Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two. According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.
- small_model 8mo ago
  Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time. The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components. Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
  - throw-qqqqq 8mo ago
    > Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time. I am only refuting the claim that Tesla has reached parity with Waymo in Austin. They are nowhere near. Because Tesla has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, I will want to see Tesla scale up the robotaxi business to the level of Waymo (which is currently far ahead) before I proclaim them the winner. You are not really backing your claims with facts or numbers, just opinion and future predictions which may or may not come true.
  - jerlam 8mo ago
    > Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip? The consumer does not care about which car picks them up or what hardware integration it has. The consumer cares about which car is available in their service area, how quickly it will arrive, how much it will cost, how quickly it can get to their destination, and that it will do so safely.

by kjksf 8mo ago

g947o 8mo ago

> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program. Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.

dinobones 8mo ago

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.

llboston 8mo ago
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
- DerekL 8mo ago
  Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robotaxi-safety-monitor-it-just-moved-them-to-a-trailing-car/ https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?). However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.
    - senordevnyc 8mo ago
      So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated. Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.
    - small_model 8mo ago
      Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.
      - senordevnyc 8mo ago
        This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices. Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.
      - WarmWash 8mo ago
        The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.
        small_model 8mo ago
testing22321 8mo ago
> and there won't be, for years, if ever. That is a lot of confidence. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? What makes you so certain?
- UltraSane 8mo ago
  Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.
  - red75prime 8mo ago
    Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them. I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.
    - UltraSane 8mo ago
      FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - red75prime 8mo ago
        Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
        8mo ago
small_model 8mo ago
lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
- senordevnyc 8mo ago
  Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…
- youarentrightjr 8mo ago
  > lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year. A year? They'll be gone in two weeks! Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
  - small_model 8mo ago
    None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
    - youarentrightjr 8mo ago
      > None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge. That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile". With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages. History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

gcanyon 8mo ago

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have. > didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.

dmoy 8mo ago
I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but > If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion. That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)
testing22321 8mo ago
If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
- kiba 8mo ago
  They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
- bradleyjg 8mo ago

WarmWash 8mo ago

Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.

bobsomers 8mo ago

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.

UltraSane 8mo ago

Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.

throw-qqqqq 8mo ago

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures. Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number. Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two. According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.

small_model 8mo ago
Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time. The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components. Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
- throw-qqqqq 8mo ago
  > Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time. I am only refuting the claim that Tesla has reached parity with Waymo in Austin. They are nowhere near. Because Tesla has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, I will want to see Tesla scale up the robotaxi business to the level of Waymo (which is currently far ahead) before I proclaim them the winner. You are not really backing your claims with facts or numbers, just opinion and future predictions which may or may not come true.
- jerlam 8mo ago
  > Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip? The consumer does not care about which car picks them up or what hardware integration it has. The consumer cares about which car is available in their service area, how quickly it will arrive, how much it will cost, how quickly it can get to their destination, and that it will do so safely.