Overview

• John Krafcik told Business Insider that Tesla’s Bay Area rides resemble Uber and said, “it’s not a robotaxi if there’s an employee inside,” adding he has no interest in trying it.
• Tesla’s invite-only service launched in Austin in June and expanded to the Bay Area in July with safety monitors onboard — in the passenger seat in Austin and the driver’s seat in California — and the company has not applied for California permits for fully driverless operation.
• Elon Musk responded on X that critics will shift to calling Tesla’s self-driving “unfairly good” and has set goals to open access in Austin next month and to reach over half of the U.S. population by year-end.
• Waymo has offered fully driverless paid rides since 2020, now operates in multiple cities with more than 1,500 vehicles, and riders in Atlanta have been canceling human-driven Uber trips to try to get matched with a Waymo, according to the reports.
• Waymo has begun road-testing a robotaxi with sixth-generation hardware featuring over 13 cameras, six radars, four lidars, and cleaning systems for the sensors, with a safety driver present during testing.