Alan Ohnsman is a Forbes senior editor who covers cleantech and advanced transportation. He joined Forbes in 2016 and works in Los Angeles. He co-authors the Current Climate newsletter, writes about promising clean energy developments and has covered Tesla since 2006, when he was with Bloomberg News. He has a graduate degree in journalism and a B.
Illustration by Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Photos by Apu Gomes/Getty Images; JannHuizenga/Getty Images
Hollywood stunts aside, the most promising robotaxi program right now isn’t Tesla’s CyberCab but Waymo’s, which has long been the self-driving industry benchmark. Fifteen years after it began as the Google Self-Driving Car project, nine years since its first fully autonomous test drive ferrying a vision-impaired passenger through Austin in 2015, and aided by at least $10 billion of investment, Waymo has built an actual business, though far from a profitable one.
Tesla, by contrast, is collecting real-world driving data from its customers via a neural network with the goal of training its software to handle any of the road and weather conditions drivers experience. And for Tesla passenger vehicles, it uses only cameras as a sensor. It’s a much lower-cost approach, but one that’s a concern for AV researchers.
Teslare recalled more than 2 million vehicles to fix a defective system that's supposed to ensure drivers pay attention when using Autopilot.“The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy,” Musk told shareholders in Tesla’s July earnings call. “So I recommend anyone who doesn't believe that Tesla would solve vehicle autonomy should not hold Tesla stock. They should sell their Tesla stock.
Cybercab Robotaxi Self-Driving Elon Waymo Musk Warner Brothers Safety Alphabet
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