Autonomous Vehicles

Today, Waymo announced its Series C funding round closed at an oversubscribed amount of $5.6 billion, led, of course, by Alphabet, Inc.

Following its latest investment, the company said it would continue to expand its Waymo-One rideshare services around current cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. In 2025, the company also plans to expand robotaxi rides to Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. The expansion of cities has resulted from an ongoing partnership between Waymo and Uber.

Now, with that context in mind, CEO Elon Musk has made new comments during the conference call following Tesla’s release of its Q3 2024 financial results:

We expect to see roughly a five- or six-fold improvement in miles between interventions [with v13] compared to 12.5. And actually, looking at the year as whole, the improvement in miles interventions, we think will be at least three orders of magnitude. So, that’s a very dramatic improvement in the course of the year, and we expect that trend to continue next year.

The second part of the comment will be more challenging to verify, but for the first time, Musk is clearly comparing two versions for the first time.

He says that Tesla’s upcoming FSD v13, which is supposed to come within the next week, will achieve a 5 to 6x increase in miles between disengagement compared to v12.5.

Ashok Elluswamy, the head of FSD at Tesla, clarified that this would be miles between critical disengagement.

That means that based on the crowdsourced data, Tesla FSD v13 will achieve between 690 and 828 miles between critical disengagement.

If Tesla indeed delivers v13 by the end of the month, we should know whether that’s true or not within the next few weeks.

• Elon Musk finally admits Tesla’s HW3 might not support full self-driving
• Tesla to offer free upgrades to FSD owners on HW3, but not yet

As long as they make good on their promise to (somehow) retrofit the capable hardware, and continue supporting FSD transfers, I don't see much problem with this. If not, it seems like they're setting themselves up for a class-action lawsuit.

• Electrek: Tesla Full Self-Driving is getting more dangerous as it get better
• Teslaoracle: Tesla FSD investigated by NHTSA for 4 incidents out of 2.4 million vehicles and billions of miles driven
• DriveTeslaCanada: Tesla’s Q3 2024 Safety Report: Autopilot Continues to Lead in Road Safety
• DriveTeslaCanada: Palo Alto in Early Discussions with Tesla To Test Robotaxi on City Streets
• Tesla: Actually Smart Summon demo video.

Networks of expensive, self-driving cars need a wide base of paying riders, which could make Uber essential to Tesla’s success.