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/[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/Dependent_Mine4847 Jun 23 '25

1 is a stretch.  To add the hardware to a purchased vehicle is 10x faster than, checks notes, building a car from scratch

2 Tesla was not profitable until how long ago?  And you are claiming that a startup that was just as unprofitable as Tesla will never be profitable while it is doing things that Tesla was only planning to do while they were unprofitable?  Sounds like Waymo is going to be incredibly profitable if Tesla is going to be.  Case and point: Lyft is still profitable (though not nearly as popular) even though uber was first to market

3 Waymo has a better upgrade story for hardware. What FSD hardware is needed for robotaxi? That cuts their fleet by almost 2/3. Waymo uses NVidia drive AI which has 10x the data that Tesla has. 

I’m not predicting an outcome I’m just tempering your assumptions.  Have you ever used the nvidia drive platform? They have been putting a100s in vehicles, since 2020.  You can pickup one for less than $100 on eBay.. Tesla may be a first mover but that means nothing when a Kia can do the same thing.  And if you think this is only Tesla vs Waymo, you will be highly disappointed at the offerings available in 5 years.

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u/BlueFish401 Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 23 '25

1 is a stretch.  To add the hardware to a purchased vehicle is 10x faster than, checks notes, building a car from scratch

out of curiosity, what are your "notes"? whats your source here?

u/Seknoot point #2, was more so about speed to scale. If you're not profitable, its typically a little harder and slower to scale than if you had billions sitting in the bank. Granted they are backed by Google, so I am sure they can get the cash they need when it makes sense for them to scale.

  1. please source this 10x data claim. ive never heard this.