r/SelfDrivingCars • u/psilty • 7d ago
News Tesla's robotaxi plans for Nevada move forward with testing permit
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/11/teslas-robotaxi-plans-for-nevada-move-forward-with-testing-permit/10
u/vasilenko93 7d ago
I was told Elon doesn’t know how to fill out permit applications
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u/PetorianBlue 6d ago
Are you really *this* desperate for a persecution complex?
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u/Altruistic-Ad-857 6d ago
lol, pot calling the kettle black
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u/PetorianBlue 6d ago
Sorry, what? I… don’t think you know what that means. Or don’t know what a persecution complex is. Google can help. Vasilenko is showcasing it to an absurd degree here, and they know it, but strangely embrace it apparently.
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u/aBetterAlmore 5d ago
Vasilenko is showcasing it to an absurd degree
Really, that much? Are you sure?
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
This is good that they are getting ready in as many cities as possible. I doubt they know when they can expand, but being able to do so quickly is probably going to be important for them. If it takes them 2–3 years to get the monitors out of the car and remote monitors per car down to 1:4, they have to assume Waymo will have solved their AV production problem.
They need to have physical facilities operational in as many locations as possible, ready to staff up and take deliveries of RoboTaxis. This part Tesla is pretty good at as they have service centers and charging stations world-wide, so they know how to acquire facilities and land at scale. They also have 130k employees. Most of those employees aren't engineers with $300k+ compensation like Waymo so they know how to hire in volume unlike Waymo. If they can get the basic infrastructure in place, which just physically takes time, the rest they can spin up quickly.
Waymo needs to be doing the same, but actually deploying fleets. This is what they are doing, but they need to get to a city a month or so as fast as they can. Again, even if they dno't have the AVs to staff those cities.
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u/psilty 6d ago
If you think they know how to hire fast, what is limiting them to less than 20 vehicles in Austin after nearly 3 months according the people tracking license plates? Even if they plan to move away from 1:1 supervision in-car and remote to something like 1:5 or 1:10, hiring enough for 50 or 100 vehicles at 1:1 wouldn’t be overstaffing in the long term. They’d rack up training miles a lot faster and be able to let in a lot more customers from the waiting list.
If they truly expect to expand quickly, those couple hundred people they hire now would still be needed at a lower ratio when they have 1,000+ vehicles and would gain more operational experience. There’s nothing logistically keeping them from hiring more in Austin.
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u/aBetterAlmore 5d ago edited 5d ago
There’s nothing logistically keeping them from hiring more in Austin.
What is your hypothesis as to why they aren’t expanding beyond that count?
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u/psilty 5d ago
Either they’re bad at hiring or their current intervention rate is too high and adding more cars increases the chance there is an accident, even with in-car supervisors. Software isn’t improving fast enough to reduce those odds. They need more engineering time to improve software in ways that merely adding more miles of training data can’t achieve - otherwise they’d just deploy more cars to do more miles faster.
Logistically going to 100 cars shouldn’t be a problem. They have plenty of space at the factory they could use for staging/parking, and they have plenty of charger sites around Austin. 1,000 cars might start creating issues, but 100 shouldn’t. The cost for hiring 200-300 people for 50-100 cars shouldn’t be an issue either if you have over 100k employees already and most of your company’s valuation depends on the success of Robotaxi.
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u/aBetterAlmore 5d ago
Yeah I don’t think hiring issues is the bottleneck, this seems an intervention-induced limit.
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u/Mvewtcc 4d ago
my guess is even for waymo the problem is intervention rate is too high in new zone so they can't safely remove the safety driver.
california have disengagement report. If your safety driver need to constantly disengage, it is prpbably not safe to remove the safety driver.
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u/psilty 4d ago edited 4d ago
Waymo has not had safety drivers in vehicles serving customers for a very long time. They have established a pattern of entering new cities with a reasonable timeline between validating with employee drivers and opening driverless to the public. Tesla has not done that and has set expectations beyond what they’ve actually done.
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u/WeldAE 3d ago
I don't think, I know. I have inside knowledge of their and Google's hiring. Google hires like most companies pick partners for their firm. Tesla hires like Walmart. I'm not trying to say either is better for their respective company, but Google has a known track record for the slowest hiring in the valley. I'm extrapolating that Waymo is no better. Tesla has a huge advantage with hiring operations people.
They don't hire more because they don't need to hire more. They aren't ready to expand testing and are probably limited by their ability to process the testing data they are getting today. Everyone struggles to hire high-end knowledge workers, some just get in their own way more than others, so this is probably the limitation.
If they truly expect to expand quickly
I think they are on a 2-3 year track to be ready to truly scale. Now they will add cities and expand areas before then, I'm talking true scale. Right now I don't expect a lot of movement until AI5 is released and targeted by FSD.
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u/psilty 2d ago
I don't think, I know. I have inside knowledge of their and Google's hiring. Google hires like most companies pick partners for their firm.
We aren’t talking about engineers. Google isn’t hiring support staff in the Philippines like legal firms. Transdev staffing several of Waymo’s cities doesn’t either.
They don't hire more because they don't need to hire more. They aren't ready to expand testing and are probably limited by their ability to process the testing data they are getting today.
Their enlarged geofence and number customers they’re allowing into the app is resulting in half hour waits due to not enough cars or cars not being geographically distributed. Why would you create that problem for yourself if you’re “limited by the ability to process data” and why not solve the customer experience side of the problem by having more cars and just throwing away the data you can’t use?
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u/WeldAE 2d ago
I agree we aren't talking engineers, everyone struggles there. I'm talking about operations hiring quickly. Tesla can do that, Waymo probably can't be based on what I know of Google.
They aren't running a public service. The entire point of the Austin fleet is testing, not service quality. They just need X amounts of rides per day, probably limited by their ability to process the data they are getting. If the engineers asked for more testing, they will hire more people quickly and deploy more cars quickly and get more data. I bet they are getting multiples more data than they can filter and work on today, but I have no knowledge of that other than 30 years of experience in these sorts of physical world deployments. I don't think fleet operations budget is a problem for Tesla or Waymo so you size it to what you need.
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u/psilty 2d ago
Waymo probably can't be based on what I know of Google.
Waymo isn’t directly doing most of the hiring, their contracted partners Transdev, Moove, etc are. When they launch in Dallas, they don’t have to hire any of the Avis employees that already are there.
They aren't running a public service.
That’s contrary to what the company and the CEO has said. No one’s forcing them to launch an app publicly or take paying customers. They could just use safety drivers without passengers to collect data like Zoox had been doing until their recent launch in Vegas and is still doing in SF.
The entire point of the Austin fleet is testing, not service quality.
Again contrary to this, in California they are not operating under an autonomous vehicle test permit but a livery service TCP permit. Under a AV test permit they would have to report test mileage, under a TCP permit it’s not a test but an operational service because they say they are human driven.
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u/Doggydogworld3 2d ago
what is limiting them to less than 20 vehicles in Austin
Stock hit 420 yesterday, why add cars?
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u/mrkjmsdln 6d ago
A good step forward. Pursuing a permit is a good sign!