r/SelfDrivingCars

"We’re expanding in Miami, with Austin, Atlanta, Houston and the SF Bay Area up next. Soon we'll cover 1,400+ square miles across 11 cities. We’re helping more people get around safely and seamlessly."

The title doesn’t mention that driving into flooded areas has happened myriad times (with no injuries), but the article does. It’s great their team is finally fixing this after almost half a year past the first event in Sept. 2025

I'm happy to see that Tesla is doing more driverless operations safely. But I continue to find Tesla's driverless operations far behind Zoox-- never mind Waymo.

From what I understand, Zoox is doing driverless rides for employees at an airport. Tesla is not.

Zoox is servicing driverless rides in San Francisco. Tesla is not.

Zoox' iOS app consistently ranks higher than the Robotaxi app in terms of download rankings.

Zoox' iOS app has 3x the number of reviews as the Robotaxi app.

Zoox had begun driverless operations in four metros-- SF, Vegas, Austin, Miami. (The last two are employee-only.) Tesla is only driverless in three metros-- Austin, Dallas, Houston.

Zoox has been operating in evenings for months. Tesla is barely starting driverless operations in the evening.

It's been ten months since the Robotaxi's launch. Any idea that FSD (which is impressive) gives Tesla a systematic advantage in driverless operations seems extremely stretched. If anything, LiDAR is a more powerful advantage than a (very good) L2++ system.

Waymo is running laps around Zoox. Zoox is running laps around Robotaxi.

WeRide just dropped their Q1 2026 and the numbers show a significant scale-up in their commercial operations. Total revenue is $16.5 million, up 57.6% YoY. Most interesting is the product revenue, which surged 115.8% to RMB29.5 million, driven by L4 vehicle sales and robotaxi expansion. Their global robotaxi fleet has reached 1300 vehicles. They also confirmed plans to expand robotaxi service into another Tier 1 Chinese city later this year. On the tech side, WRD 3.0 has secured design wins for almost 30 vehicle models with OEMs like GAC and Chery. They are pushing their GENESIS simulation platform, claiming it accelerates corner-case training by thousands of times compared to traditional testing.

Just an observation, I notice that there's a quiet assumption that Waymo will just keep scaling their robotaxis and stay in that lane. But IMO it's almost certain that Waymo will offer an easy-to-integrate package for car makers that will probably be priced at under $10k and integrated into the car. It could be something similar to the most recent system by Rivian. The big question is what is the timeline and path to get there.

Robotaxis are on the road, being tested now.

But that's never been the dream for me - its always been a self driving personal vehicle.

If you take a cab or ride share everywhere you needed to go your going broke, fast. And there's a sense of your car being a second home away from home. Your own personal private space fully under your control. Its even the law.

Still, driving consumes resources. Driving in rush hour gridlock traffic tires you out. To have your own private space you own and control but don't have to expend mental energy on in stressful traffic would be amazing.

Other than Tesla, who's working on this? How far have they come?

And how do we navigate misuse? Example: "go get a rockstar parking spot at the venue and hold it till I arrive 8 hours later in my other car"

Thanks guys

So I downloaded the NHTSA crash database, and had an LLM tool try to estimate fault for all the crashes, which (except for Tesla) are described in natural language, plus some formal parameters that give you clues. I will be publishing the spreadsheet and an article about it, but first I don't trust the LLM--though it's results are not that bad-- so I am asking for humans to lend a hand. DM me and I'll give you write access to the google sheet so you can add human corrections. There's 800 of them so it won't take long if several folks volunteer.

Here are the statistics I got based on the LLM analysis with a bit of correction to some of them by me.

Operating Entity	Crashes	At Fault	Percent fault	ADS-fault injury	Higher Severity at fault
Tesla	15	7	46.67%	1	2
Waymo	693	94	13.56%	3	62
Nuro	4	1	25.00%	0	1
Motional	9	1	11.11%	0	0
May	11	6	54.55%	0	3
Beep,	5	0	0.00%	0	0
Aurora	4	2	50.00%	0	1
Zoox	31	1	3.23%	1	0
Avride	36	11	30.56%	1	5
Stack	1	1	100.00%	0	1
Ohmio	1	0	0.00%	0	0

I excluded crashes marked as ADS not engaged, but in reality some human editing is needed as in some it was recently disengaged.

First conclusion: We don't have enough data on most companies to get mathematically significant results. Really only Waymo and maybe Zoox and Avride. However, Waymo's fault number looks very low. The lower it is, the more important it is to calculate it.

Traditional history of crash data analysis avoids assigning fault because it's hard to do in ordinary crashes. So they use "involved" crashes as a proxy, figuring that, on average, a fleet of cars will be at fault in roughly half of the crashes in which they are involved. On average, but that's what statisticians are after.

But if Waymo is indeed at-fault in only 14% of crashes, then non-at-fault crashes start to overwhelm their crash totals. What we truly care about is fault, and "involved" is only a proxy. But it's a very bad proxy if it's this far off. Unlike ordinary crashes, robot crashes are recorded in full 3D. The data can be objective and complete. (There is still a bias because the narrative is written by the operator, of course.)

At least from the LLM, I calculate Waymo in 700 crashes and around 200 million miles has only been at fault in 3 injuries, which is a remarkably good number. DM me to help make the LLM analysis more accurate. Include your gmail account for sharing. It's fast, just do a few rows if that's all you have time for.