Waymo launches in Atlanta, trying to take wind out of Tesla’s sails
This weekend, Tesla launched its robotaxi program in Austin with about 20 vehicles, while Waymo has more than 100 in the city. Here’s how the two services stack up.
Just two days after Tesla served its first robotaxi ride in Austin, its first market, Google’s Waymo is expanding to its fifth major market: Atlanta.
Starting today, people using the Uber app for trips within 65 square miles across Atlanta — from Buckhead north of the city through downtown and south to Capitol View — can opt in to taking Waymo’s autonomous cars. Google is up 1% while uber is up more than 4% in early trading.
The company likened the Atlanta rollout to its March launch in Austin, where it opened with dozens of cars and now has more than 100 vehicles, with plans to grow to “hundreds.”
Waymo has a total of 1,500 autonomous vehicles operating in five major markets, including San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Next up for Waymo is Miami and potentially Washington, DC. As of last month, the company docked more than 10 million paid trips and is doing more than a quarter million per week.
Meanwhile, Tesla launched in Austin this weekend with about 10 to 20 cars. The company didn’t disclose the exact square milage, but it’s isolated to a tourist-heavy area south of downtown. Waymo, on the other hand, covers 37 square miles north and south of the river, including downtown Austin.
Here’s how the two services stack up by vehicles and coverage area:
There are some other notable differences, too. While Tesla’s robotaxi is available only to a small group of influencers and requires that a Tesla employee sit in the front passenger seat to supervise, Waymo’s service is open to the public and has no one else is in the car. Waymo operates 24 hours a day, while so far Tesla is running from 6 a.m. to midnight. Waymo also costs more than a traditional ride-hailing service, while Tesla, for now, costs a flat fee of $4.20 per ride.
Still, any of the above can change quickly.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said, despite the prominent existence of Waymo, that his company has no real competitors. “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” Musk said on the company’s last earnings call. “At least as far as I’m aware, Tesla will have, I don’t know, 99% market share or something ridiculous.”
On the same call, he derided Waymo’s business, which outfits its cars with numerous expensive sensors including lidar, as costing “way-mo money.”
Musk and Tesla are banking on the success of Tesla’s less expensive, camera-only robotaxis (which for now are actually new Model Ys, not the blingy Cybercab concept the company unveiled in October) to help scale its autonomous driving technology to all the vehicles it sells, not just those operated as robotaxis. Currently, Tesla owners can use supervised full self-driving software, while the robotaxis are using an unsupervised “branch” that Musk says will be merged with the standard one “soon.”
Until then, there’s a lot of daylight between Tesla’s and Waymo’s businesses.
