Tesla declares that it elevated the scale of its Robotaxi fleet by 50%, however it by no means confirmed the unique fleet dimension.
It seems Tesla was solely working about 20 automobiles in its “robotaxi” fleet so the quantity possible solely rose to about 30 automobiles.
In late June, Tesla launched its ‘Robotaxi’ service to paying clients beneath an invite-only program.
We now have warned that the launch of Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ is extra about optics, giving the impression that Tesla is main in autonomy, moderately than developments in deploying a secure autonomous ride-hailing system.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been making predictions in regards to the automaker fixing unsupervised self-driving by the top of yearly for the final 6 years, and it by no means occurred.
He and Tesla badly wanted a win to avoid wasting face, as Waymo is now quickly increasing its personal autonomous ride-hailing service throughout half a dozen US cities.
To provide the impression that it was additionally able to deploy such a system, Tesla took an identical method to promoting self-driving expertise in client automobiles – particularly, doing it earlier than it’s prepared.
Tesla started providing a ride-hailing service in Austin, using automobiles outfitted with an up to date model of its client Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) expertise. As a substitute of Tesla house owners being supervisors and liable for the automobiles like within the client model, Tesla put in staff within the entrance passenger seats with their fingers on a kill change, able to cease the automobile at any second.
To provide the impression that it’s scaling sooner than Waymo, Tesla shortly expanded its Austin service space to grow to be greater than Waymo’s.
Nonetheless, it didn’t develop its fleet of Robotaxis, usually leading to wait occasions of greater than 20 minutes to get right into a automobile.
This week, Tesla expanded its service space once more to incorporate its native manufacturing facility and eventually introduced a rise within the variety of automobiles within the fleet:
The issue is that Tesla by no means confirmed the preliminary dimension of the fleet in Austin. The automaker is purposely maintaining this imprecise by mentioning a share improve moderately than a brand new complete variety of automobiles within the fleet.
The most effective-supported baseline is 15 to twenty automobiles, based mostly on preliminary photographs from the Robotaxi management room and sightings of automobiles, which might end in a most of roughly 30 automobiles within the fleet now.
As compared, Waymo is already working greater than 100 automobiles in Austin.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla shareholders are celebrating this as a victory: ‘Tesla is scaling sooner than Waymo in Austin’, they declare.
This can be a fallacy. There’s a giant distinction between the 2 right here.
Tesla can develop the service space quickly, because it doesn’t function a completely autonomous driving system within the Robotaxi fleet. It’s nonetheless very a lot a supervised system, and the bottleneck is the supervisors; therefore, why Tesla operates solely a small fleet, about one-third the scale of Waymo’s.
Waymo ensures that its system operates autonomously with out requiring supervisors within the automobile earlier than welcoming paying clients and increasing in a particular market, similar to Austin.
Briefly, Tesla is doing this to provide the impression that it’s competing with Waymo, however the fact is that they haven’t even began competing. As soon as they will drive autonomously with out supervision, that’s when the race begins, and Tesla is already about 5 years behind on that.
