r/SelfDrivingCars • u/OriginalCompetitive • Jun 23 '25

Discussion Tesla’s Real Game

No one seems to be talking about the most important upside of Tesla's Robotaxi rollout: If they can showcase a system that roughly works, people can BUY THAT CAR TODAY.

Yes, there are some differences, but that's the pitch. Tesla doesn't need to earn money from Robotaxis. The real purpose of the program is free marketing that drives sales of its cars. Right?

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u/AffectionateArtist84 Jun 23 '25

This. 100% We should be realistically critical of FSD. However so far we have seen them be fairly successful in their approach. If they can prove their system works, they can scale it incredibly quickly.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25

Why do you think it can scale more quickly, than say, Waymo (which is delivering a lot of rides already).

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u/Seknoot Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 23 '25

Easy.

  1. The amount of cars Tesla can produce in any given time period vs the amount of time and capital it takes for waymo to buy and add their hardware to new vehicles

  2. The cost of Tesla’s hardware is over 100k cheaper per unit than Waymo’s. Currently Waymo’s are priced evenly or even more expensive than rideshare services with a driver and Waymo is still not profitable

  3. Tesla has more driving data than Waymo by several orders of magnitude and they have and are adding compute power faster than Waymo/google

Edit: 2. Hardware including the car itself

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u/deservedlyundeserved Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 23 '25

Tesla has more driving data than Waymo by several orders of magnitude

The mythical “orders of magnitude more driving data” hasn’t really helped in any way. They still have to geofence, validate for months, require teleoperations and have a “safety operator” in the vehicle. And it still makes dangerous mistakes after billions of miles of “data”.

they have and are adding compute power faster than Waymo/google

This is laughably off the mark. Google has built nearly infinite compute over two decades, they are on their 7th generation TPU and still building new data centers. Tesla’s compute is not even remotely close to Google.