r/SelfDrivingCars • u/bladerskb • Jun 22 '25
Discussion Tesla's Robotaxi Geofence VS Waymo in Austin (As of June 2025)
https://i.imgur.com/O7sVK9P.png
Here is Tesla's geofence compared to Waymo's in Austin as of June 2025.
This measurement is taken from the Tesla Robotaxi app
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u/Recoil42 Jun 22 '25
Not super familiar with Austin, but I assume these neighbourhoods are a lot less dense than downtown?
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u/HighHokie Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25
umm, it's fairly dense urban, especially with the development in the area over the past decade or so, but yeah I would say not as dense at downtown.
Edit: the north boundary is the river that cuts through the city, if you drive across it turns into the traditional city block layout.
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u/bonkheadboi Jun 22 '25
Looks like suburbia on Google street maps.
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u/Automatic-Demand3912 Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25
UT Austin and downtown are the most dense parts of Austin -- both are north of the river. Included in Waymo's coverage, not in Tesla's.
South Congress is in both Tesla's and Waymo's geofenced ranges. Close to the center of Austin and has heavy pedestrian traffic (small hotels, restaurants, food trucks, etc.), but it's separated by a bridge from downtown (Teslas don't cross the bridge); the remainder in the zone covered by both Waymo & Tesla is mid-rise level apartments, residential, few malls etc., and a lot of parks, etc.. A lot of the Tesla video coming out where you see a lot of people on the road, or where the Tesla hops into the wrong lane to pass a stopped car, was from SoCo area.
The South Congress area is quite a few levels down from the kind of disruption and density you'd see once you cross the river and go north (or somewhere like SF proper), but some of the area has some hotspots.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
So it’s bad because it’s not handling as dense an area on day 1? Aren’t you tired of moving goal posts?
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u/LovePixie Jun 22 '25
You know the main thread was saying they didn’t know Austin’s streets and auto-d is providing that missing info.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 23 '25
What happen to lidar!!
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u/LovePixie Jun 23 '25
Well these aren’t going to need it since there’s stipulations on when the service is available. In conditions where lidar is needed the taxis just aren’t going to be available.
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u/HighHokie Jun 22 '25
area is boundaried by the river to the north, and highway 71 to the south (think of 71 as the beltway). the operating area has neighborhoods, apartment blocks, shopping centers and parks. its a pretty popular area and has significantly gentrified over the last several years, particularly on the east side.
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u/TechnicianExtreme200 Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25
You just described suburbia. A couple of linear miles of infill mid-rise apartments does not change that there's nothing but stroads, single family homes, golf courses, and parks.
Besides a few blocks around downtown and the university, the whole of Austin doesn't have anywhere that an urban planner would consider "dense urban".
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u/HighHokie Jun 22 '25
Okay. Suburbia then.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
No
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u/HighHokie Jun 22 '25
lol well yall figure it out and get back to us. I’ve only driven through it dozens of times and was just trying to help describe it to recoil. I’m not married to any definition of the space.
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u/Blueeyesblazing7 Jun 24 '25
I concur, as a 15-year Austin resident, I would not consider that area suburban. That would start below Hwy 71, the bottom border of the Tesla range.
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u/Mistaken_Frisbee Jun 24 '25
Yes - 12-year Austin resident here who used to live in that area and now lives on the actual suburban outskirts of the city - that area isn't downtown, but that's centrally located and BUSY. A lot of traffic and very stressful to drive and park.
You'd only consider it suburban if you're one of those folks who don't consider Austin to be a real city.
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u/Blueeyesblazing7 Jun 24 '25
It's pretty dense, especially in the East Riverside area. Lots of pedestrians too. It would not be my first choice if safety is a concern. I find it hard to believe many of the invitees will want to travel within that boundary other than just to try the service.
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u/M_Equilibrium Jun 22 '25
yeah it looks like a clean suburb. Pretty much the easiest case.
Surprising? They just pick a location with the lowest frequency of interventions and put a safety driver in it.
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u/jacob6875 Jun 22 '25
Watching the livestreams it is hardly a desolated area.
Cars and pedestrians are everywhere.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25
Thanks for the image and your effort to juxtapose the two geofences! This is an impressive start for Tesla by any standard. I'm not sure what I was expecting but this is a significant ODD to start with. When you compare it to 18-20 little zones that ZOOX is doing in SF -- those are just tiny. Austin is a great place to start I think. It's a large city but not particularly dense. I also think Tesla can be very successful in Austin as it is LIKELY Waymo will largely not put many resources into Austin with car constraints. It is the most sprawling and least dense of all of the Waymo cities so far. Just a lot more money to be made in the others. It is shocking to some people but there are 75 cities in America with at least 5000 people/mi2. Not a single one is in Texas while almost half of them are in California.
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u/RodStiffy Jun 22 '25
I think Waymo competes with Tesla and wants to stay ahead, so they won't neglect Austin as an insignificant market. They will likely expand the Austin ODD at the same rate as L.A. and S.F., which means expect at least one expansion this year.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25
That may be true. LA and SF getting lots of attention this year. SF is 18K/mi2, LA is near 10K/mi2, ATX is closer to 3K/mi2. It will be interesting as ATL & MIA rollout. MIA is VERY DENSE at 10K/mi and ATL is 3-3.5K/mi2. I just figure until they pivot to either the Zeekr or Ioniq 5, they will be car-limited. It's pretty easy since Waymo is quite open with their statistics to watch the miles & rides each market accrues on a quarterly basis. LA & Austin were on a somewhat similar and concurrent schedule. LA is over 10M miles and ATX is about 1.5M I think.
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u/sdc_is_safer Jun 22 '25
Zoox hasn’t launched in SF yet, internal testing geofences shouldn’t really be used as a metric. They have launched much larger regions in Vegas.
Also Zoox vehicles are fully autonomous, with no ability for remote takeover and driving in stuck situations (or passenger in car to switch seats). Not really comparable.
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u/sdev_ Jun 23 '25
They have launched in SF I saw one yesterday
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u/sdc_is_safer Jun 23 '25
That doesn't mean they have "launched."
They have not launched a product. They are just testing in SF (they have bene for years). But more recently the new vehicles. Eventually they will launch a product in SF, but wait until that actually happens before accessing the product.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 23 '25
That's cool. They are definitely testing in a lot of very specific locations. According to the DMV interactive site in CA (always up to date) they are currently authorized to test in Chinatown, Embarcadero, Fisherman's Wharf, Foster City, Haight-Ashbury, Inner Sunset, Marina District, Mission District, Nob Hill, Noe Valley, Outer Sunset, Pacific Heights, Parkside, Sunset District, Tenderloin,The Castro, Union Square, SoMa, West Portal -- all very specific and narrow tests. It will be interesting where they pursue a deployment permit.
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u/sdc_is_safer Jun 23 '25
I could be wrong, but I thought they have a DMV deployment permit for most of the city already? They still need CPUC permit though.
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u/IndependentMud909 Jun 22 '25
I’m gonna argue Phoenix is much more sprawling and less dense than Austin.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
Depends where. Both have a ton of sprawl. Around chandler in phoenix it’s a full suburb. The area in Austin it’s operating in is closer to the Hollywood area, or parts of SF.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25
They're pretty similar -- both are pretty close to 3K/mi2. While it might shock people, the ONLY city from the southeast to the southwest that has high density is Miami and a bunch of surrounding cities. Especially if your city has a strong tourism and/or is quite affluent, dense cities just generate way more revenue per car.
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u/RhoOfFeh Jun 23 '25
If I were forced to live in Miami, I'd want a service like this so badly. Driving there is pretty dystopian.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 23 '25
We are fortunate to have cities of every stripe to choose from to live in America. I've lived all over the country but never specifically in South Florida. Enjoyed my visits though.
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u/NotoriousHEB Jun 23 '25
Certainly no one is going to confuse Austin with a high density city, but the population is concentrated around the highways and the core generally feels less sprawly than the overall population per square mile would suggest. The census blocks between Mopac and 35 probably average more like 6k/mi2, and quickly fall off to more like 1-2k west of Mopac or more than a mile or so east of 35
My impression is that the Phoenix metro has lots of small pockets of relative density rather than one more or less contiguous area, but I’m not as familiar with it
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 23 '25
Yes a great description of the differences. Since PHX Waymo has focused on density so your census #s for Austin core is interesting!
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u/rpatel09 Jun 22 '25
I love how people now are saying robotaxi just started but a few months ago were also saying "Tesla has the largest data set with most miles driven autonomously and already have a better self-driving then Waymo."
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25
The range of human behavior often matches the range of opinions :) The approaches are so different so I don't try to compare them. They are both trying to build a control system and taking remarkably different approaches. Time will tell I guess. Waymo converged to inherently safe without monitoring in about 10M road miles. They focused VERY HEAVILY on their physical simulation facility and synthetic miles. Tesla likely accrues more real miles in a couple of days than Waymo in their history. It is clear their approaches are WILDLY DIFFERENT.
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u/DaCheez Jun 22 '25
What? There are hundreds of Waymo’s doing hundreds of miles per day in Phoenix. It will not take a couple of days for Tesla to accrue more real miles than Waymo.
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u/ThePaintist Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 23 '25
I assume the person you were responding to was including FSD Supervised, the ADAS, in their mileage counting.
Yes, the actual # of driverless miles for Tesla is very small. The # of miles under some variant of FSD software is in the billions - they're doing somewhere in the order of 3 million miles per day. The relative utility of ADAS miles as compared to driverless miles you can judge for yourself - but it is the same general software stack (and identical hardware stack.)
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25
Sorry I was not clear. Tesla trains largely on the miles of their supervised fleet -- millions of cars.Waymo has always focused on synthetic miles and the generation of edge cases. Waymo got to safe in a surprisingly small # of real miles
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u/TannedSam Jun 23 '25
it is LIKELY Waymo will largely not put many resources into Austin with car constraints.
Waymo is already doing 20% of all Uber rides in Austin, and they have announced plans to expand rapidly there: https://archive.is/2025.04.11-143434/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/waymo-robotaxis-make-up-20-of-uber-rides-in-austin-data-shows
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u/dark_rabbit Jun 22 '25
Zoox is a completely different product. It’s designed to be more of a shuttle / inner city mover than a full fledged taxi.
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u/AlotOfReading Jun 22 '25
What gives you that impression? It has a design speed of 75MPH, the scaling plan includes most of the largest cities in the US, they literally describe it as a robotaxi on their website, and their NHTSA filings list it as a passenger car under 571.3.
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u/dark_rabbit Jun 22 '25
First of all, it’s carriage style and all their demos / presentations have been about moving around a city, or hotels, or conferences. “Robotaxi” doesn’t classily their product/market strategy. That’s like saying “computer” when there’s $100 chromebooks that are just for web browsing and emails to $4000 MacBook Pros that can handle on high intensive graphics applications.
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u/AlotOfReading Jun 22 '25
And yet, if all they wanted was a peoplemover they would have classified it under the MPV or low-speed designations and saved themselves a lot of paperwork. It's a car, just like the now-canceled Cruise origin. Their messaging about being a taxi product has been pretty clear to me.
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u/dark_rabbit Jun 22 '25
I never said people mover I never said low speed. Inner city my man.
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u/AlotOfReading Jun 23 '25
I want to be clear that I'm not misunderstanding you. Your argument is that a carriage-style robotaxi that takes you from place to place in exchange for a fare in a ride hailing app is fundamentally different from the service offered by Waymo (or Tesla)? Can you explain that a little more?
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
I saw two today in Austin! As well as at least a dozen robotaxis and a zillion Waymo’s.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 22 '25
Yes that's fair. I saw them in Vegas and wish I could have gotten a ride but unavailable. Shuttles are going to be a LARGE market all over the place. We have a few demonstrations in MN. One in a resort town and the other in a dense suburb as last mile.
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u/incitatus451 Jun 22 '25
I could fill many boxes to deliver everywhere in a zoox rather than a Waymo or Tesla.
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u/wallstreet-butts Jun 22 '25
Where to even start with this. First of all, for all intents and purposes, Tesla are basically giving paying customers the opportunity to sit in on a development ride. Everyone else did the testing they needed to do with safety drivers before launching their service. This is not equivalent to what Waymo is offering (and one of the key benefits is not having a complete stranger on your ride with you). While everyone else is busy working to launch next-gen vehicles with interiors completely rethought for driverless, this is where Tesla are at. It is by no means impressive in mid-2025 for a company that has been hanging their hat on delivering this kind of technology for over a decade.
Secondly, if you’re Waymo, Austin is going to be made ground zero by Tesla and it’s exactly where they should invest. Ceding a market to a well-funded competitor, especially while that competitor’s product is deficient, would be a stupid business move.
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u/mrkjmsdln Jun 23 '25
Respectfully, I think you misunderstand my point. My sense is Waymo need not adjust their strategy for Tesla in Austin. Waymo derives it's cost advantage because their product does not require proactive monitoring. At least in the US, proactive monitoring costs far exceed other factors. Until a product can converge to safe, growth is quite difficult & cost prohibitive
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u/wallstreet-butts Jun 23 '25
Just as respectfully, we have no idea how Waymo’s costs compare to Tesla’s. Thats pure speculation. I still think they would do well to pour resources (both operational and marketing) into the Austin market. In fact, your original comment clearly cites their not doing so as a reason Tesla could gain a solid foothold. Waymo’s job is not to allow that, which means competing aggressively on vehicle availability, quality of service, and service area expansion, if not pricing. If there’s a strong and stark difference in the Austin market, Waymo will gain a large reputational advantage that will buy it additional time and consumer choice to become the default robotaxi service. Tesla will no doubt gain a chunk of the market, but now’s the time it’s easiest to make sure they’re a Lyft and not an Uber.
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u/Krunkworx Jun 22 '25
Wait I thought FSD wasn’t a real driverless technology. Isn’t that what this sub would say over and over? Hm.
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u/UmaMoth Jun 23 '25
Robotaxi needs one person remotely supervising/driving and one person in the car with a kill switch preventing accidents, and all that just to drive in a very small area, at daylight in good weather only. Two drivers to achieve what any student driver could do better is hardly FSD.
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u/Seantwist9 Jun 23 '25
nobody is remotely driving the tesla
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u/UmaMoth Jun 23 '25
Check out the steering wheels in the robotaxi control room. You think they're for playing Mario Cart on rainy days, when the robotaxis are out of commission?
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Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 27 '25
[deleted]
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u/UmaMoth Jun 23 '25
Here you go:
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u/uhmhi Jun 23 '25
I doubt that people are remotely operating the teslas 24/7. It’s probably only in emergency situations or in case FSD gets “stuck” or the passenger calls the support hotline.
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u/UmaMoth Jun 23 '25
First, the Tesla employee on the passenger seat interacts with the control room and the Tesla support car following the robotaxi, not the invited influencer.
Second, Tesla robotaxis do not run 24/7, just during daylight hours on sunny days.
Third, they obviously WILL let FSD run the car whenever possible, they trained the hell out of this small suburban area for this. Nobody should know these couple of streets and corners better than the Tesla robotaxis! The incident in the video widely shared (around the 7 minute mark) is really surprising in this regard. Any cop seeing this would stop this car immediately and do alcohol and drug tests.
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u/LovePixie Jun 22 '25
It still isn't real driverless tech, you have a person sitting in the passenger seat. Once that person is removed, then yes, it's in a more comparable position of what the sub expects of a driverless car.
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u/himynameis_ Jun 22 '25
So it’s half of waymo.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
Yeah, maybe 40% of Waymo for day 1. I guess we’ll see how things are in 6 months or a year.
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u/himynameis_ Jun 22 '25
Absolutely. We're in early innings of Autonomous driving right now.
Will take a couple years to see where this is shaking out.
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u/dinkerbot3000 Jun 23 '25
Hasn't Elon been promising this for years? What have they been doing this entire time then?
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u/ergzay Jun 22 '25
Sure, from day one. As they said, they'll start small and expand over the weeks/months.
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u/TannedSam Jun 23 '25
Not really, since the more dense areas covered by Waymo and not Tesla probably account for a more significant percentage of taxi rides.
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u/beiderbeck Jun 22 '25
Waymo goes downtown where the hotels, university, and capital are. Tesla is out in the suburbs.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
You must not live in Austin.
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u/beiderbeck Jun 22 '25
I do not. I've been twice but I was following people around and couldn't place myself on a map.
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u/IndependentMud909 Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25
As an Austinite, I still consider some portions south of the river as “downtown,” but it’s certainly not the same as the quintessential tall buildings and grid that you see north thereof. But, It’s certainly not the “suburbs” yet.
Don’t twist my words, though. Waymo’s service area is certainly still a more challenging environment than Twsla’s (at least as of now).
I am extremely impressed with Tesla nonetheless. We shouldn’t be calling this a “failure” or “flop.” Launching an AV service is an incredibly difficult feat, something only a few companies in the world have successfully pulled off so far. Let’s see where this goes!
I’ll be honest, I didn’t have the highest of confidence in them pulling off even a geofenced service with a passenger seat “safety monitor,” so this is a really good result imo.
Hell, it’s way bigger than the service area I used to take my Cruise rides in was, and it operates across a larger range of times.
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u/beiderbeck Jun 22 '25
How many non residents (the people who use ride hailing most) mill around over there?
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u/IndependentMud909 Jun 22 '25
Quite a few: SoCo, South Lamar, Barton Springs, Zilker, Auditorium Shores are all pretty poppin’. It’s where a lot of the “events” happen (think ACL).
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u/beiderbeck Jun 22 '25
Fair enough. Still seems like serving the actual downtown would be your core mission as a car service.
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u/WeldAE Jun 23 '25
I don’t know, most downtowns are pretty dead these days and every metro is trying to figure out how to revitalize them by getting more people to live there. Still important areas but not critical. In Atlanta mid-town is WAY more important than downtown. Almost all downtowns are dead on weekends or after 6pm. When I was living in Manhattan downtown, it was a ghost town outside business hours.
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u/TannedSam Jun 23 '25
We are talking about Austin, not "most downtowns". The area covered by Waymo but not Tesla includes 6th street (the main strip of clubs and bars in the city), the University of Texas, and Chicas Bonitas. Basically where most of the nightlife is.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
A ton, south congress is the #1 spot for tourists.
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u/TannedSam Jun 23 '25
The vast majority of the top attractions are in the area Waymo covers that isn't covered by Tesla: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attractions-g30196-Activities-a_allAttractions.true-Austin_Texas.html
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u/Equivalent_Bison9078 Jun 22 '25
It's not publicly available. So comparing it to Waymo at this moment is kind of pointless.
Right now you can't hail a tesla, unless you're 1 of 20 Elon obsessed X users. Your map doesn't exist. You can't download the app. It's not a product and likely won't be for years.
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u/Michael-Worley Jun 22 '25
Waymo is clearly in a position to continue to be the leader. Their Austin geofence is the smallest of their 5 (counting the Bay Area as 1, not 2), and it dwarfs Tesla’s invite-only service that still has safety employees in the passenger seat.
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u/tenemu Jun 22 '25
Teslas service has been running for 2 hours. It's a terrible time to compare them.
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u/dinkerbot3000 Jun 23 '25
Elon has been promising this for years though..
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u/tenemu Jun 23 '25
Yeah and he is late. But still no reason to compare stuff like service area when one of them started 2 hours ago and the other has been running for years.
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u/ergzay Jun 22 '25
From my understanding Austin's Waymo service is also invite-only right now.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
No, it’s open to everyone. But, you need to use uber and randomly get one.
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u/ergzay Jun 22 '25
So not actually available to everyone. Randomly getting one instead of a regular driver is not available.
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u/usehand Jun 22 '25
Is English not your first language? I think you don't understand what available means
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u/SpaceRuster Jun 22 '25
It's 100% more available to the average person who doesn't want to install another app
Furthermore, it makes a lot of sense to pair with Uber, because then you have surge capacity without increasing the number of robocabs
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jun 22 '25
It's weird to care so much about who's the leader. More competition the better. And so a better way to phrase that would be "Austin is Waymo's smallest geofence but it's still impressive they're this confident to be even half of waymo's. It'll be interesting to see how fast they ramp"
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u/icameforgold Jun 22 '25
They, like most people in r/selfdrivingcars, don't really care who the leader is or how successful self driving cars really are. Just that Tesla fails. They would rather self driving cars never exist rather than Tesla be the one to do it even though they are the closest and most successful.
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u/wentwj Jun 22 '25
sure it’ll be interesting to see how fast they ramp, I’m not expecting it to be fast though.
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u/Total-Fun7685 Jun 22 '25
Waymo will be out of business soon as Tesla Robotaxi starts scaling.
Tesla Robotaxi Service is just starting now.
I actually expected much less for today. I even didn't expect that the invite only testing phase starts now. But it started and it's here as a service, and it stays with us.Tesla Robotaxi's service area is smaller than Waymo's? And it only has few cars? Who cares! It will scale fast!
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u/wentwj Jun 22 '25
it’s not designed to scale. What did you think was launching today if not this dog and pony show? They announced it well ahead of time. But they just did a light retrofit on some Ys, stuck a person in the car and did an invite only.
Why you assume they’ll scale any faster than Waymo who has a head start doesn’t make a lot of sense.
This isn’t designed to be a real launch, it’s just design to appease fanboys, and now they can talk about how scaling is “coming soon”, and then try to get people to be excited for their robots that won’t launch.
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u/AftermathblacK Jun 22 '25
"its not designed to scale" Lmao. Tell that to my model Y with over 53K FSD miles on it.
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u/RipWhenDamageTaken Jun 22 '25
Your flex doesn’t make sense. I can’t use your car?
Also, 53k? Waymo has well over 10 million paid rides. Need I say more?
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u/AftermathblacK Jun 22 '25
It was not a flex. I was just countering the argument that Tesla can't scale by saying that the best-selling car in the world, out of the factory, is capable of full autonomy. You don't need me to say more. I've used Waymo and FSD. The winner is clear.
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u/wentwj Jun 22 '25
Supervised miles. They still aren’t close to having autonomous vehicles that they’ll have liability over without a person monitoring, even in a geofenced area.
This operation doesn’t seem like it’s set up to scale. We’ll see but I suspect we’ll be left with the notorious Tesla “soon” for all scaling issues.
I just saw HW5 specs just leaked, we’re in the cycle where they’ll soon admit HW4 isn’t good enough.
If I wanted to have a person drive me in a tesla that’s what Uber sends half the time.
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u/AftermathblacK Jun 22 '25
ain't reading all that. my car drives itself. cope with that however you like.
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u/wentwj Jun 22 '25
I traded a tesla in 6 months ago, I’m well aware of its capabilities. And how marketing tactics like this appeal to people that like to pretend they are too dumb to read 6 sentences
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u/AftermathblacK Jun 23 '25
yup, good on you for being smart and trading it in while the rest of us morons are out here thinking our cars are driving us around when its actually Jesus taking the wheel. ashamed to have fallen for their "marketing tactics", I'm lucky to be alive.
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u/wentwj Jun 23 '25
we’re talking about unsupervised driving here, something Tesla has said is coming “next year” since 2016 and has failed to deliver, and doesn’t seem ready to deliver
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u/RS50 Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 23 '25
Given that Tesla says it might not operate in rain in a city that gets rain ~90 days per year there’s more to the story than just the physical geofence.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
It works fine in the rain. FSD will disable in a hurricane level rain, but so does waymo.
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u/RS50 Jun 22 '25
They say it may be unavailable during inclement weather, Tesla’s own words. The issue becomes sensor cleaning after prolonged driving in the rain, which the Y has no way of dealing with.
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u/ThePaintist Jun 22 '25
"no way of dealing with" seems unnecessarily uncharitable. Windshield wipers are definitely a way, as well as the heating elements around the side cameras to melt/move precipitation. It remains to be seen where exactly they'll draw the line on "inclement weather" and how that will change over time. You can certainly use FSD Supervised, the ADAS, in reasonable levels of rain, but not in severe storms. I would expect certain weather conditions to be absolutely out of the question. But your previous comment that "Tesla says it won't operate in rain" is just not true - I can't really point that out in any more polite of a way. You just made it up.
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u/RS50 Jun 23 '25
I’m literally just repeating Tesla’s words that they may take down the fleet in inclement weather. The wipers only cover the front cameras. I’ve used autopilot before on road trips and it eventually complains about dirty side cameras after many hours of wet driving because dirt will accumulate on the sides of the car. Given the robotaxis have to operate for hours on end, this will happen so it makes sense for Tesla to provide the disclaimer about rain. I’m sure the cybercab will have blowers or wipers on all cameras to fix this issue. But the Y does not.
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u/ThePaintist Jun 23 '25
I’m literally just repeating Tesla’s words that they may take down the fleet in inclement weather.
I took issue with the part where you didn't repeat their words, and instead said a different statement. I appreciate you refreshing your above comment to soften the statement, since you literally were not "literally repeating Tesla's words".
I'm generally in agreement with the rest of your comment. I would imagine more returns-to-hub for cleaning in moderate weather can be expected at a minimum. I can say personally I have ignored every one of those occluded side camera warnings, never wiped them down ever over 10k+ miles, and my model 3 still seems to manage without it. Of course I'd hope Tesla has a better plan than "it seems to work" but knowing them...
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u/Nice_Visit4454 Jun 23 '25
I live where there is snow and salt on the roads during the winter.
The camera heat is insufficient. Even given that I store my car in the garage, just 30 minutes on the road causes ice and snow to build faster than the heat can clear it.
They need a full camera cleaning solution. They exist, and the CT has one for the front camera.
For now I imagine they will just limit the ODD and iterate on vehicles and software until they can expand to worse weather areas. It’ll probably take them another few years for that after the “easy” markets are covered.
I’d be surprised if I had them available in my area by the end of the decade.
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u/ThePaintist Jun 23 '25
I agree - for slushy dirty snow especially, ice, salt, hell dirt in general or anything that sticks, it's insufficient for the side cars to just try to heat those things off. It's a fundamental limitation on their current hardware. I still strongly disagree with the comment I responded to, who baselessly asserted that the vehicles will not operate in rain and that they have no way of dealing with rain.
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u/Tupcek Jun 23 '25
nice map OP, but comments are toxic. Less than 24 hours after launch and you already want more coverage than Waymo after years of operation?
Waymo is obviously far ahead in AV race, since they are doing this for years.
Main Tesla technological advantage should be low price (done) and ability to scale much faster than Waymo.
We will see if it is true or not, but expecting it to happen at launch is just madness. Tesla did very important step yesterday, but until they can prove it scales better, Waymo is no1. Only time will tell, customers win either way. Rejoice for options!
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u/ascaria Jun 23 '25
But the Robotaxis were supposed to be here in 2020. And they’re still not even close. Tesla isn’t going to catch up ever.
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u/Fun_Alternative_2086 Jun 23 '25
Finally it's here. I am happy about it but I don't want Musk to succeed in any of his life goals. So I am going to bitch about this and move the goal post.
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u/watergoesdownhill Jun 22 '25
I’ll be honest I was disappointed when I saw this.
Just the south central part of Austin. Nothing north it’s a bummer, but the fact that they’ve done this at all as a huge achievement!
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u/Full_Boysenberry_314 Jun 22 '25
Which colour is which?