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Tesla's robotaxis are set to hit the streets of Austin, Texas. When it comes to self-driving vehicles, the EV giant faces stiff competition from the Alphabet-backed Waymo (GOOG, GOOGL), which already has vehicles on the roads in several cities, one of which may soon be New York City. Stifel NextGen Transport analyst Stephen Gengaro has ridden in both vehicles. He shares his key takeaways from his experiences and why, ultimately, Tesla (TSLA) may have a leg up on the rival. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Video Transcript 00:00 Speaker A Waymo, we know, right now Stephen, far ahead. What are Tesla's competitive advantages in this space? When you explain them to clients, or what do you tell them? 00:17 Stephen Yeah, it's interesting. I've been in, I've been in Waymos and full self-driving Teslas and and, you know, the first thing that that jumped out to me was that the Tesla system felt more, more natural, right, in the process. Now, the, when you look at the Waymo system, and, you know, this is on the vehicles you see in San Francisco and other cities. Uh, or sounds like they're coming to New York at some point in the not too distant future.
They have multiple redundancies in the system, right? They have cameras, they have LiDAR, they have radar and they, they because of those redundancies you know if people look at them and say there there's a higher level of safety. When you look at the, the Tesla system, you know, it's camera based and it's AI based, and they have massive quantities of data uh to do the analysis. Uh, to me the vehicles kind of felt a little more natural, but look but what we tell people is you know the lack of redundancies, the camera-based system only. There are some risks to that. Now, on the positive side, there's really three big benefits.
Right, one is cost, right, if you're, if you're talking about a, a robotaxi which you're showing on the screen right now or whether we should talk about a Model Y that I that I subscribed to FSD with, you know the car can be $30 or $40,000. A a Waymo fully equipped with all the sensors, etc. is well north of a hundred thousand dollars. So cost is one. Second is uh, I think clearly the massive fleet of Teslas that are out there right now, which can become part of of a robotaxi fleet over time.
But if I have a Tesla Model Y in the driveway and I have a you know full self-driving, you know theoretically I can drive that car to work and dump it into the robotaxi fleet. So the ability to scale based on a massive installed base uh is probably the second uh big positive. And, and then the third is their ability, I think, to have some flexibility whether it's uh, you know, some Tesla owned assets, assets owned by by individuals and even, even you know partnering with at some point or even using a you know me having a Tesla and dumping it into an Uber or or a Lyft fleet if I if I so choose. So there's multiple avenues for the company over time. Related Videos 03:07 Don't expect to see Tesla robotaxis everywhere just yet Yahoo Finance Video • 15 hours ago 02:26 Tesla's robotaxi rollout kicks off 'next phase' of self-driving Yahoo Finance Video • 21 hours ago 03:27 Kenya Protests Over Taxes Bloomberg • yesterday 05:47 Price Increases Will Come Next Fall: eToro's Lale Akoner Bloomberg • yesterday View Comments
Tesla vs. Waymo: What is the difference between the vehicles?
June 21, 2025 05:00 AM PDT | By EODHD
