Waymo leads in self-driving: Can Tesla's robotaxi take its crown?

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), has been working on self-driving cars for years. But now rivals, such as Tesla (TSLA), are starting to catch up. Yahoo Finance Senior Autos Reporter Pras Subramanian takes a closer look at Waymo's rise and the competition. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here. Video Transcript 00:00 Josh Well, Waymo has emerged as a leader in autonomous vehicle technology and robotaxi services.

Its roots, of course, are with Google, as its self-driving car project, and Waymo has come a long way. Our senior autos reporter, Pras Subramanian, joins us now to talk about its success as a leader in this sector, Pras. 00:22 Pras Subramanian Hey Josh, yeah, you mentioned, yeah, so it started off as a as a as an offshoot of Google, uh, Google X in the X division issue back in those days what they used to call autonomous nine, and after some testing and trying to get permits off the ground in 2016, the project became Waymo. Uh, started testing its Pacifica hybrids and took off from there. 2018, Waymo, uh, worked with Jaguar, paired up with them to get their i-Pace EVs in for testing.

You see these now in the streets in LA and places like that. Uh, you know, Waymo uses a combination of vision, radar, lidar, what they call multimodal. They claim this is the safest solution. Now they have the most robotaxi miles driven. They perform around 250,000 trips a week, right? So other rivals like GM's Cruise and AV tech companies like Argo AI are they're gone.

Leaving only a few competitors like WeRide and Pony.ai and Zoox in the space. Now, challenges, they need to scale up. They have around 700 to 1000 vehicles in in major markets and can produce at their factory around 1500 a year. An expert tells me that that could be a bottleneck for them in the future, whereas Tesla, right, Tesla with their big test coming up on on I'm sorry their start of their test unofficially on the 12th, if their hardware is sufficient, I have millions they have millions of vehicles on the road already, and when you pair that with their robotaxi software, you could see them easily overtake Waymo. That's a big if.

Tesla service is just beginning, years behind Waymo, and if Musk's big bet on a vision-only system paired with the neural network that Tesla built can take on and possibly surpass Waymo, uh, there's still a lot to prove to see whether that can actually happen. 03:02 Josh Now Pras, have you taken a Waymo? And if so, what did you think of the experience? I ask because I haven't. 03:13 Pras Subramanian I did, about a month ago, I was in LA and I took a Waymo, uh, in the western part of the city to to a friend's place and I I was actually deeply impressed by it. I thought that it was a very slick. I used the app to order the the Waymo.

It comes to you. It has your it has your initials on the top and little screen so you know it's yours. You open the door with the app. You close the door, get inside, and you and then you start the ride when you're inside the car, hit the button on the app. All of a sudden it pairs your phone, it it says you can stream music, it you can you can change the temperature to your to your liking.

It's very pleasant. The car is actually whipped around. I think at a decent pace, not a slow thing in my opinion. Uh, got to me, got me where I need to be and at a competitive rate to Uber. Related Videos 06:25 Can Elon Musk Deliver With the Robotaxi Reveal? Bloomberg • 5 hours ago 02:01 Tesla's robotaxi rollout: What to expect Yahoo Finance Video • yesterday 03:19 Markets should see new all-time highs this summer: Strategist Yahoo Finance Video • yesterday 03:12 The 4 megatrend risks companies are most worried about: Aon CEO Yahoo Finance Video • 5 hours ago View Comments