> Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.
* Elon has been making wildly exaggerated and over-optimistic claims for a decade and continues to do so
* Tesla has recently made huge strides in capability and has a clear path to full autonomy
And to be fair, many other car companies also promised self driving cars, e.g. Audi in 2014 promising driverless cars by 2016 [1]. It's just that Tesla is still executing on the promise whereas many other carmakers have fizzled out on their ambitions. As the Rodney Brooks article itself mentions,
> As a reminder of how strong the hype was and the certainty of promises that it was just around the corner here is a snapshot of a whole bunch of predictions by major executives from 2017.
[1] https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a610930/audi-promises-to-del...
In particular, Jaguar Waymos are over 150k a pop. It seems far fetched that any of them will make ever break even. New generation is reportedly $75k per vehicle which is significantly better. I could not find any data for Zoox vehicle cost, but given how few of them there are it's a non-player.
Finally the elephant in the room. Outside of camera vs lidar holy war, Tesla seems well positioned to dominate supply side of the equation if the demand shows up. Robotaxis are reportedly under $35k, they own the factories and know how to build more, they also own the maintenance side.
(Or, probably, with Tesla tech. But you definitely can’t do it without.)
The word 'Tesla' appears 17 times in the article.