Waymo founder: Tesla hoped to compete with Waymo, but failed utterly and completely for 10 yrs
John Krafcik, Waymo founder and former CEO, clapped back at Tesla CEO Elon Musk after his comments on Waymo at Tesla’s earnings earlier this week.
He brought a little dose of reality to Musk’s delusions.
During Tesla’s earnings call, CEO Elon Musk made a bunch of new claims about updated timelines for Tesla to deliver on long-promised self-driving milestones.
Musk even stated that he doesn’t see anyone competing with Tesla on autonomous driving and that he believes Tesla will take “90-something percent market share.”
When explicitly asked about Waymo, which is already seen as the market leader by most experts, Musk again claimed that it won’t be competitive because of cost:
Well, okay. The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs way more money, but that is the issue. The car is very expensive, made in low volume. Teslas are probably cost 25% or 20% of what a Waymo costs and made in very high volume. So, ironically, like, we’re the ones to make the bet that a pure AI solution with cameras and what do you have? The car actually will listen for sirens and that kind of thing. It’s the right move. And Waymo decided that an expensive sensor suite is the way to go, even though Google is very good at AI. So I’m wondering. And it is worth noting that Tesla has both an incredible AI software team and AI hardware chip design team.
While it’s true that Waymo’s vehicles are more expensive, this has little to do with an “expensive sensor suite”, as Musk claimed.
Tesla’s sensor suite, which consists only of cameras, is certainly less expensive than Waymo’s, which includes cameras, radar, and lidar sensors. Still, most of the cost difference is due to Tesla building vehicles in high volumes for consumers while Waymo buys existing vehicles and retrofits them with its sensor suite in much lower volumes.
Talking to Business Insider this week, John Krafcik, who helped launch Google’s self-driving vehicle program and was Waymo’s first CEO until 2021, doesn’t see it as a problem:
In the long run, the cost of sensors has a “trivial cost-per-mile impact over the useful life of a robotaxi,” he told BI,” while also providing massive quantifiable safety benefits.”
Krafcik has been skeptical of Tesla’s efforts for a while and even suggested that what Tesla plans to launch in Austin in June could amount to “faking” self-driving.
Now, the former Waymo CEO highlights how it’s not the first time Musk claimed that Tesla would compete with Waymo, but it is yet to happen:
“Tesla has never competed with Waymo — they’ve never sold a robotaxi ride to a public rider, but they’ve sold a lot of cars. And although Tesla hopes to compete with Waymo someday, they’ve failed utterly and completely at this for each of the 10 years they’ve been talking about it.”
This week, Waymo announced that it is now completing 250,000 self-driving rides per week.
In June, Tesla plans to launch a limited “10 to 20-car” fleet to provide geo-fenced and teleoperation-assisted rides in Austin.
At this rate, it would take a while for Tesla to catch up to Waymo’s volume and that’s if it can.
Krafcik added:
Well, after 10 years of undelivered promises, it seems pretty rational for those watching to be data- and evidence-driven. There’s still a lot of promises, still no Tesla liability for FSD driving performance, and still no universal robotaxi service.”
After Tesla’s earnings, the automaker announced that its “FSD Supervised ride-hailing service” operating for employees in Austin and San Francisco completed “over 1,500 trips and 15,000 miles of driving.”
However, these were completed with drivers ready to take control, and even if they had no interventions in those 15,000 miles, it wouldn’t be enough to prove a higher safety than human drivers, who crash on average every 700,000 miles.
Electrek’s Take
He has a point. No matter how much Tesla shareholders want to believe Musk when he says that Tesla is ahead, the truth is that when it launches its limited 10-20-car fleet in Austin, it will only now start to compete with Waymo.
By that time, Waymo might be doing over 300,000 rides per week, and there’s no evidence that Tesla will be able to scale faster yet.
Just like Waymo, Tesla’s fleet will be geo-fenced and teleoperation-assisted as there’s no evidence that Tesla’s generalized solution is anywhere close to working.
In short, Tesla has the same scaling limitation as Waymo, other than potentially mapping, but even that’s a question mark.
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![Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/54629423281_6315c46dff_k.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!
In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.
Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.
Stay tuned for more!
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The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!
We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.
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Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.
Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.
Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:
The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.
The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.
It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.
The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.
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