00:00 Speaker A
Tesla announcing its robo-taxis have hit the streets of Austin with no safety monitor.
00:05 Speaker A
Here with more on the autonomous space, let’s get to Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian, Pras.
00:10 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, so, you know, the the big catalyst is here, I guess. So Musk announced today after after some videos uh were posted on on X.com.
00:15 Pras Subramanian
Uh Musk, you know, linked to one of them and said, yes, we are doing, uh he wrote, yes, start we’re starting, excuse me, uh started Tesla robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.
00:23 Pras Subramanian
Congrats to the Tesla AI team. Now, the Tesla AI team led by
00:26 Pras Subramanian
Ashok Elluswamy added that the there’s a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robo-taxi fleet with safety monitors
00:33 Pras Subramanian
and the ratio will increase over time. So they’re starting off slow.
00:36 Pras Subramanian
I think there’s some like 20 to 50 uh robo-taxis in Austin and on only a couple now have no safety monitors.
00:41 Pras Subramanian
So they’ll eventually they’ll they’ll ramp that up and um, you know, that’s sort of it’s unclear whether Texas, the state of Texas has given them the approval to do that or it’s an internal thing. Uh we’ll see, but, you know, soon we’ll have
00:49 Pras Subramanian
pretty much all of them unsupervised if things go well. And then California’s a bit trickier there with the different licensing. But I think there’s uh you know there might be teleoperators that that Waymo uses too. So it’s not fully, you know, there’s someone still watching so you don’t you don’t feel like you’re totally in the in the in the wild here. So, you know, Waymo we talked about is on top here, but you know, Tesla could catch up.
01:03 Pras Subramanian
The question is, you know, who can scale faster?
01:05 Speaker A
So which you mentioned Waymo. Some news there too, expanding its service. Walk me through that one.
01:09 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, so today they announced this morning, they announced they’re going to uh they’ve begun Miami service now. So in a big part of the Miami
01:16 Pras Subramanian
greater area. and they’re going to eventually add the airport, Miami International as a as a destination for uh the Waymo Robo taxis. And you know, look, they’re already in Austin, Atlanta, LA, Phoenix,
01:23 Pras Subramanian
greater San Francisco. They’re going to add potentially this this year, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, Washington, Nashville. So, look, you know, they’ve already proven they can operate in certain of these geographic geographical regions. Level four, mea- meaning fully autonomous, um but in a set region. The question is, like I said,
01:38 Pras Subramanian
it who’s tech is better? Can Tesla catch up? Probably. Uh but the question is, is it safer? The metrics so far show that Waymo is a little bit safer, right? Uh but that can change. And I think I think that Wall Street seems to believe, I think that Tesla can scale faster.
01:52 Speaker A
Alright, thank you Pras. Appreciate it.
