I have been turning this Tesla story over for a while and I keep landing in the same place. The interesting part is whether this company becomes the firm that builds machines which actually move through the world and learn from that movement.
A lot of AI right now is on a screen. Tesla is trying to put it in traffic, in a factory, and eventually in a house. That sounds simple when you say it out loud. It is not simple to do. You need cars that already drive, cameras that already record, plants that already stamp metal, and chips that do not melt when you take them out of a data center. Very few companies have all of that under one roof. That is the “category-defining-Tesla-case” as I see it.
Robotaxis are the first place this becomes visible to a normal person. Waymo is the service you can book today in a serious way. A few thousand vehicles, more than a dozen cities, hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week. Tesla is behind that commercial scoreboard and I will not talk around it. In Texas the registered autonomous fleet is in the low hundreds, including the first Cybercabs, and the fully driver-out cars that the public can actually use are still a smaller group. So Waymo is winning the present.
Tesla’s argument is the next step. They can manufacture more vehicles in a day than Waymo has in the whole fleet, and they already have billions of miles of customer driving video against Waymo’s low hundreds of millions. That only turns into a business if the software is good enough to leave the driver at home and if cities keep saying yes. If those two things happen, the factory starts to matter in a way no lab can copy. If they do not, you just have a well marketed pilot.
What Tesla is worth from here, how I order robotaxi against Optimus and Terafab, and where I think the cash actually shows up first is for paying readers.
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