Tesla hosted a private event for its Cybercab robotaxi service on Thursday, but the company's autonomous-driving ambitions remain far behind Waymo on nearly every operational metric, and the broader robotaxi sector has yet to demonstrate a path to profitability2.
Tesla said in July that its robotaxi fleet had accumulated 380,000 cumulative miles of unsupervised rides, less than 0.2% of Waymo's stated total of 220 million driverless miles provided to customers since 2018. Waymo reported in March that it was completing 500,000 paid rides per week in its driverless cars, a figure it said had doubled over the previous year.
The geographic gap is similarly wide. Tesla offers unsupervised rides in six cities in Texas and Florida. Waymo provides driverless rides in 14 cities and rolled out service in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa on Tuesday.
Tesla has been running a robotaxi service using its Model Y SUV since June 2025, initially with a company employee behind the wheel. More recently, some of its robotaxis have operated without a driver. The Cybercab, first shown at a Hollywood event two years ago, represents the company's purpose-built robotaxi vehicle, and prototypes have been spotted in cities across the United States.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted last year that the company's robotaxi service would be available to half of the American population by 2025 and told investors in January that Tesla will eventually produce several times more Cybercabs per year than all its other vehicles combined.
The two companies also diverge on sensor architecture. Tesla relies solely on cameras to guide its vehicles, while Waymo uses a combination of cameras, lidar, and radar. Tesla has encountered more difficulty obtaining regulatory approval to expand its service. Waymo previously argued that fully autonomous vehicles cannot operate safely at scale without a multi-sensor approach combining cameras, lidar, and radar ctx.
Tesla's stock performance reflects investor unease. Shares closed Wednesday down more than 20% year-to-date and were up only 7% over the preceding six months1.
Profitability remains elusive across the sector. Alphabet, which houses Waymo under its Other Bets segment, reported that the segment lost $3.9 billion in the first half of this year on revenue of $793 million, down from $823 million a year earlier.
ANALYSIS The mileage comparison is stark: Tesla's 380,000 cumulative unsupervised miles against Waymo's 220 million driverless miles places the two companies in different operational tiers, regardless of Tesla's production-volume ambitions for the Cybercab. Alphabet's Other Bets losses, meanwhile, indicate that even the market leader in deployed robotaxi miles has not translated scale into financial returns, raising questions about the unit economics of the entire category.