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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.

Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te...

It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future...

If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.

Reddit is extremely anti Musk and Tesla, that sub reddit being the typical example. Let's just wait and see where we are in 6 months.

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.

> 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.

I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.

FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.

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.

Not a single waymo requires a "safety driver" and the self driving never disengages the way it does on Teslas.

Waymo routinely uses safety drivers, sorry, "autonomous specialists" when expanding to new cities[1][2]. Waymo cars occasionally contact the remote support. If support is not available, the cars just stay where they stopped[3].

Tesla has rolled out a small number of cars with no safety driver[4].

In short, you are either grossly misinformed or intentionally lying. Is it a political echochamber you are stuck in?

[1] https://waymo.com/faq/ "Our vehicles are primarily driving autonomously, but you’ll sometimes notice that our cars have autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat. These specialists are there to monitor our autonomous driving technology and share important feedback to help us improve the Waymo experience."

[2] https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk/ "Our autonomous specialists who are present in the vehicle during testing are highly trained professionals."

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36zdxl41jro

[4] https://youtu.be/03e5ixbXIa4

You are grossly misinformed. Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times. In novel situations humans will provide instructions on what path to take but this is relatively infrequent. Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control when the car does something stupid. The small number of robotaxis without safety drives are limited to a tiny area and not open to the public.

Waymo works while robotaxi doesn't.

> Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times

Consumer version of FSD can park a car if a driver doesn't take contol[1]. Waymo seems to require a remote command to initiate parking instead of just standing there with hazard lights on[2].

> Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control

Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel. So a driver can't be ready to take control. Stop lying. I no longer believe that you are misinformed.

[1] https://youtu.be/VU3i1Pgk4M0?t=1460

[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r... "We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately"

"Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel."

Almost ALL of them do. And NO waymo's need them.

https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...

Robotaxis is checkers compared to Waymo Chesss

Technology is moving fast.

When do you think it will be reliable enough?

Not for a very long time. Just think about how big of an advantage lidar and radar are at night or radar is in snow and rain?

If Tesla had been smart they would have used regular cameras and event based cameras where the pixels send a signal whenever their brightness changes enough. These can have microsecond latency. And multi spectral cameras. Combined this data would provide very rich data for neural networks.

Sounds like you’re an expert. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? In what capacity?

I'm not an expert, just someone who understand how these technologies work. Sensor fusion is a fascinating thing.

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.

> 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?

None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.

> 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.

Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.

> Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k

https://www.walmart.com/ip/ST-MOTOROLA-XT2413V-CDMA-LTE-BLUE...

Try to avoid cherry picking if you want to have a discussion where you or the other person learns something. All the Elon stans on this site that I've encountered are highly disingenuous, starting to think that's not a coincidence.

Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…

> 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/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

I hope they are both successful, find their own niche, and even more players enter the market.

Agree, competition is healthy.

> 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.

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)

They'd need one more thing, a time machine.

TSLA market cap was about 50B for the first several years of their FSD effort.

I think they'd choose lidar if they started now.

If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T

You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.

You can. It’s called a secondary offering. The SEC has a whole process.

You can sell more stock to raise money regardless of market cap.

They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.

If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.

This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.

$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)

You're years out of date on that number. I doubt it's been true this decade. Reasonable current estimates are under a few tens of thousand at most.

No, I know how much each honeycomb costs (BOM cost, that is); pretty confident on the radars; and I can guess at the cameras and compute.

Then they're way behind others in the industry, and I'm not sure I believe that given the people I know there.

Then you should be asking them instead of arguing with random internet people

It's between 7k (chinese) and 17k (european) now.

You are either intentionally lying or very confident about facts you don't know. Could you please source your numbers?

You are confident that I am wrong - why don't you share your source?

I'm giving ballpark numbers because I am in this space and don't want to dox myself.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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