> 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.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
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-robota...
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.
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.
> 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?
Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.
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.