Sorry, are all of those model 3 and Y vehicles robotaxis?

Or are you saying that because they produced 1.5 million non-robotaxi cars in 2025 that the estimate of producing 1 million robotaxis in the following year is pretty reasonable, because making them autonomous taxis is a minor feature bump...?

No, I'm saying that the original content is low-effort shitposting, and that Tesla has the ability to scale industrial production to over 1mm 'things' per year, as evidenced by production last year. I did the OP the mild courtesy of asking him to open up a useful conversation. For instance, "Is there going to be demand for 1mm robots, and if so, when?" Or "How much actual retooling is necessary in Fremont for this?" Both seem like useful and interesting things to talk about.

I think teslas issue is that they need the AI5 chip for robotaxi ops, the current chip just doesn’t cut it. So if they have batches end of 2026 and start optimizing the models, by mid 2027 volume production you might have robotaxis coming online at about 100k per month. Waymo currently has less than 10k cars on the road.

Lots of ifs here. If they can enable hardware 4 for robotaxi ops then they can have 3m+ cars ready to go. But I am skeptical of it. And given that Elon’s top priority is scaling chips and AI5, I think that is proof that he thinks it is likely necessary too.

So 1m robotaxis by end of 2026 is theoretically possible but I think unlikely, and it’s more likely in the 200k-1m by end of 2027. If they pull that off, they could still be largest by then if Waymo doesn’t rapidly scale. Fun times!

My understanding is superficial, so do knock it down, not it seems to me that tesla insists on vision-only hour self driving, which vastly increases the requirement for ML. Whereas Waymo has a lower sum technology requirement by using both lidar and vision, and have moved faster. So when you say "tesla needs the AI5 chip", i hear the rider "...to avoid a public volte face".

I suppose that bulky lidar modules are undesirable in premium consumer goods, but i don't see that downside for taxis.

What am I missing?

It might be that the Waymo sensor suite was key to launch; I don't have any actual knowledge. My impression though was that they basically wired in a large call center for years first to make decisions for the fleet, and have slowly narrowed the scope of those decisions. Elon definitely wasn't interested in staffing large call centers.

I also believe that Waymo relied on much more intensive mapping than Tesla does/did -- so you could imagine two really different graphs -- Waymo's quality and deployment starts higher, but it is perhaps capped against places they're willing to do the scanning, and by their labor Capex. They will be racing to lower the scanning requirements and lower the labor requirements. Meanwhile Tesla looks worse for a long time because they've bet on getting tech together for an 'everywhere' launch, and it's a J curve around quality -- useless at 3 9s, and very, very useful at 5 9s. If those are the actual dynamics, figuring out who will be the 'winner' needs the following strategy assessment:

1) A take on whether or not robotaxis are 'winner take all/most' (I propose they are not, switching cost for consumers is super low)

2) If you think both companies will get to 'good enough' a take on capital dynamics for at-scale launch (I think Tesla wins here, because Elon will rely on owner's capital for at-scale launch, or at least can if he wants to, while it seems very unlikely that Waymo will start selling their cars to individual operators at scale in a timely fashion)

3) An organizational assessment - if we assume that vision only ML will eventually work at all for 5 9s, can Waymo 'trim down' their data and labor stack faster than Tesla can scale up their vision-only ML?

Upshot - I wouldn't bet against Tesla being the dominant robotaxi in ten years. But I would be very surprised if it matters very much or they were the only one - eventually the stack will get commoditized. Tesla's solved almost all the hard problems of getting most of these on the road, except for that last 9 of reliability -- you'd have to really hate Elon to think they won't get there at all with the AI resources between SX/xAI and Tesla available.

He is saying all of this for his IPO.

Its still a hard problem and while he likes to move that fast, nothing around him wants to move that fast. No burocrazy at least.

Bosten dynamics has the better robot which doesn't overheat and can more and they plan to rollout commercially 2028.

Musks Robot overheated last year, we have not seen a single non staged real demonstration in public and he already wants to mass produce them.

This is just lying at this point and has very little to do how fast someone can scale something if its not ready to be scaled up.

Dynamics can make on the order of 25k robots a year though. Not enough to matter in a gdp sense. There is one US company that can scale this kind of manufacturing currently. So to my mind the question is : can Tesla ever get there on tech, and if so, can they be first to scale to a million units? You don’t need them to have the best robot now. Or ever really if they’re the first to scale.

No, but once Optimus is delivered in 2027, it will surely be able to drive your Tesla for you?

Optimus was still overheating last year.

And while Musk is very good in announcing stuff, delivering he is not. boring company? Robotaxis on masses?

Did you watch his keynote last week? Man he is ignorant. It would be a million times cheaper and easier to build a powerplant, fiber and energy lines in the dessert of USA and build their big data centers before building anything in space.

But no he talks about dyson sphere, space etc. like we need any of it today (perhaps in a 100 years) and it would be more cost effective than on earth.

He is a lunatec

Their robotaxis are not reliable but they stubbornly won’t add lidar. It’s a solved problem.