Tesla fans—and CEO Elon Musk himself—are excited about the prospects for Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) software. Tesla released a major upgrade—version 12.3—of the software in March. Then, last month, Musk announced that Tesla would unveil a purpose-built robotaxi on August 8. Last week, Musk announced that a new version of FSD—12.4—will come out in the coming days and will have a “5X to 10X improvement in miles per intervention.”
But I think fans expecting Tesla to launch a driverless taxi service in the near future will be disappointed.
During a late March trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to try the latest self-driving technology from both Tesla and Google’s Waymo.
During a 45-minute test drive in a Tesla Model X, I had to intervene twice to correct mistakes by the FSD software. In contrast, I rode in driverless Waymo vehicles for more than two hours and didn’t notice a single mistake.
So while Tesla’s FSD version 12.3 seems like a significant improvement over previous versions of FSD, it still lags behind Waymo’s technology.
However, Waymo’s impressive performance comes with an asterisk. While no one was behind the wheel during my rides, Waymo has remote operators that sometimes provide guidance to its vehicles (Waymo declined to tell me whether—or how often—remote operators intervened during my rides). And while Tesla’s FSD works on all road types, Waymo’s taxis avoid freeways.
Many Tesla fans see these limitations as signs that Waymo is headed for a technological dead end. They see Tesla’s FSD, with its capacity to operate in all cities and on all road types, as a more general technology that will soon surpass Waymo.
But this fundamentally misunderstands the situation.
Safely operating driverless vehicles on public roads is hard. With no one in the driver’s seat, a single mistake can be deadly—especially at freeway speeds. So Waymo launched its driverless service in 2020 in the easiest environment it could find—residential streets in the Phoenix suburbs—and has been gradually ratcheting up the difficulty level as it gains confidence in its technology.