Tesla Supervised Robotaxi Ridehailing for the Past Year at Waymo Scale Already?

Tesla has been operating supervised ridehailing of robotaxi for Tesla employees in California for the past year. Tesla also has large numbers of employees in Texas. It would be trivial for Tesla to start a supervised ridehailing for robotaxi for Tesla employees in Texas.

Tesla has 20,000 employees in Fremont, California. Tesla has over 20,000 employees in Texas and is in the process of ramping to 60,000 employees.

Waymo has 150,000 rides per week. If half of Tesla employees (10,000) in California were given rides to and from work every day then this would be 100,000 rides per week. Tesla employees often work overtime and on weekends.

Tesla just offering the service to employees can put its supervised ridehailing at Waymo scale already. Tesla in California and Texas just for employees will be bigger than Waymo. Tesla will be able expand an unsupervised service in California and Texas at a far larger scale than Waymo by the middle of 2025.

ARK Invest has outlined the strategic and tactical advantages of Tesla launching a human-driven ride-hail service first.

Ark Invest believesTesla should enjoy a price umbrella at its robotaxi launch, thanks to the high level of current ride-hail prices, as shown below, while leveraging a lower cost per mile than the average vehicle on the road. Why? The operating costs associated with electric vehicles are roughly one-third those of their gas-powered counterparts.4 Without safety drivers, Tesla has suggested that, at scale, its robotaxi rides will cost consumers only $0.30-0.40 cents per mile,5 slightly higher than ARK’s estimate of ~$0.25 per mile but well below current ride-hail costs of ~$2 per mile and personal car ownership costs of ~$0.70 per mile.6 Lower price points could unlock ~$11 trillion in revenue potential, ~80 times larger than the addressable market that Uber and Lyft target today, as shown below.

Tasha Baidu Apollo Go Largest Robotaxi Company Now Developing Tesla Approach

Ark Invest Tasha Keaney says Apollo Go is the largest robotaxi company in China and the largest in the world by volume of rides.

Apollo Go is now trying to use the Tesla end to end approach.

The challenge that Baidu and others have it that Tesla needed to train with millions of cars. Baidu only has few thousand cars.

The largest EV company in China is BYD. If BYD wanted to copy Tesla they would need to get Tesla Hardware 4 equivalent into all fo their cars. It would take BYD at least 3-4 years to follow Tesla to version 13 FSD.

This is why I believe all of the Chinese companies will license Tesla FSD.