#waymo

#waymo

On a new section of its website, Tesla claims that in North America, owners using the company's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software are driving around 5 million miles before a major collision, and around 1.5 million miles before a minor collision. That's a far lower rate than the national average based on statistics provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). That data shows people get in a major collision every 699,000 miles, and a minor one every 229,000, at least according to Tesla's interpretation.

Back in August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Waymo can't drive on highways because of the mix of sensors on the Alphabet company's robotaxis. Waymo's fifth-generation autonomous driving platform has five lidars, six radar sensors, and 29 cameras. It's this mix of lidar, radar, and cameras, Musk wrote on X, that leads to "sensor contention" in which the information from the lidar and radars "disagree" with the cameras.

By the end of 2026, you should expect us to be offering 1 million trips per week,

Those self-conratulatory claims from Cruise officials came to a complete halt after a self-driving Cruise vehicle dragged a San Francisco pedestrian 20 feet, in an incident that ultimately led to the downfall of a Cruise as a company. Cruise is gone and now Waymo is the dominant robotaxi company, but they too are now dealing with the blowback of a safety violation some 2,500 miles away in Atlanta, Georgia.