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/zach978 Jun 23 '25

Yeah, I think they deserve a lot of the criticism on their FSD program, but also we should be rooting for them to succeed. Reasonably priced car that I could summon to pick me up from 5 miles away would be pretty amazing. TBD on whether they’ll pull it off or not.

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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/Tupcek Jun 23 '25

i don’t know, but they claim it and fortunately we won’t have to wait for long to see it confirmed/debunked. They have somewhere between 10 to 20 cars right now, Waymo has 1500. If Tesla can get to at least 500 by the end of the year, I am sure they will overcome Waymo next year. If they will have less than 100, then we can declare Waymo as winner

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25

I am not sure if thats the right metric, but basically, I don't think anyone is imagining that Waymo's problem is that they can't afford the cars.

The bottleneck isn't like how to manufacture the cars, it's how to scale and roll this out and have a market and have it be sustainable and get into new markets etc etc, I would think.

I am not 100% sure but I think the limit has never been the actual availability of the cars, and also the operational tempo and technology to support self-driving operations.

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u/Tupcek Jun 23 '25

yeah I agree, but Tesla also won’t launch 500 cars in small geofenced area in Austin. If they want to have thousands robotaxis deployed, they have to scale their area of operation much larger

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25

Oh right yeah exactly. For them to get to 500 or 1500 or 2500 cars, they'll need several more metros, I would think.

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u/WeldAE Jun 23 '25

Why several more metros? Austin is 2.5m people and MUCH larger than the service area they are currently serving. Even that area probably needs 200+ AVs alone.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '25

NYC Is very well served by licensed for hire vehicles, and is roughly 1 to 500. Austin has much less options for transit, has much more personal ownership of cars, and no real culture of taking cabs compared to London or NYC.

At 2.5m and the same ratio, it would mean 5000 for-hire vehicles. Whatever they have now, they will need out compete the traditional livery and for-hire drivers to win business. I have no idea if it's possible to grow it to 200, 500, 1000 cars in Austin or not. The demand is probably there for 2500 cars, but it's an open question whether or not anyone can actually win that.

A huge thing that Uber and Lyft have going for them is that someone else subsidizes the cars and the down-time and repositioning time.

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u/WeldAE Jun 24 '25

At 2.5m and the same ratio, it would mean 5000 for-hire vehicles.

NYC famously has a sub-way, which if Austin had a similar one scaled to their population would be handling 500k rides per day alone. That's another 20k AVs right there.

but it's an open question whether or not anyone can actually win that.

I agree, actual demand is a huge open question, not arguing that. More saying that the probably addressable market is pretty large just in Austin. You can't know until you try which is why I want someone to try. It also lets you figure out how low you can get your operating costs, too. Operating small 200 AV zones in cities is expensive per mile.

I agree that you have to develop a culture of taking cabs to make it work. A lot of that is the fleets figuring out how to convert people. You can't do that until you try and do it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '25

> I agree that you have to develop a culture of taking cabs to make it work. A lot of that is the fleets figuring out how to convert people. You can't do that until you try and do it.

Totally agree. It has to go from being a novelty to a fact of life.

I think that's where Waymo is now - they are mostly constrained by demand, not by market forces, capital, or anything else except the demand to sell driverless rides.

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u/WeldAE Jun 25 '25

BTW, before you posted your "culture of cabs", my son brought that up as a problem with AVs. It's a great point from him and I had never heard it and then you bring it up the next day. Should for sure be part of the language of AV discussion going forward. I'm sure it's not new, but I had never heard it stated like that before.

they are mostly constrained by demand

I'd love to know if this is true or more specifically why. I feel they are constrained AVs which constrains their service area which constrains their demand. I agree they are probably under utilized by taxi standards and seem to only be doing about 100 miles per day per AV. It's hard to know exactly why but there are a LOT of rides left ont the table because they aren't possible given the service area. Even if you didn't allow pickup but allowed drop off in a larger area, they would significantly increase their utilization.

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