Tesla keeps hyping robotaxis as its future. But it’s trailing rival Waymo in a field yet to prove profitable

Nothing is more important to Tesla than its ambitious plan for self-driving “robotaxis.” But even as it hosts an event for its Cybercab service Thursday, it still has a long way to catch up to the competition in an industry where few have made any money at all. It’s a little unclear what, exactly, Tesla is launching Thursday, and the company is not saying much beyond its invitations to the private event. But the public first got a look at the Cybercab at a glitzy Hollywood event two years ago, and prototypes have been seen in cities across America since then. Even if the company pulls off the technological feat that would be full Cybercab service, however, it might run into a much larger issue – profits. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Tesla is far behind robotaxi targets – and a rival The company has been running a robotaxi service using its Model Y SUV since June 2025, sometimes with a company employee behind the wheel. More recently, its robotaxis have run without a driver in the some cars. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has arguably banked the company on the Cybercab’s success. He predicted last year that the company’s robotaxi service would be available to half of the American population by 2025, and told investors in January that the company will eventually “make several times more Cybercabs per year than all our other vehicles combined.” But Tesla only offers unsupervised rides in six cities in Texas and Florida, and investors may have grown skeptical of Musk’s confident predictions. Shares of Tesla (TSLA) are up only 7% over the last six months and closed Wednesday down more than 20% year-to-date. “Investing is about betting on the future,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an expert in autonomous vehicles and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “Tesla is very good at selling that future. But at least with respect to automated driving everywhere and all the time, the company has been far less successful at actually delivering it.” And if Tesla wants to be successful, it also has a long way to go to get past a key rival: Waymo, the self-driving car service from Google parent Alphabet. Waymo said in March that it was up to 500,000 paid rides in its driverless cars a week and that number had doubled in the previous year. The company rolled out its service in three more cities – Denver, San Diego and Tampa – on Tuesday, bringing it to 14 cities in which it provides driverless rides. And it said that through March, it had provided 220 million miles of driverless rides to customers since it began in 2018. Tesla, on the other hand, said in July it had provided 380,000 cumulative miles of unsupervised rides in its robotaxis, less than 0.2% of Waymo’s stated total. Profitability and regulatory challenges Even if Tesla rolls out Cybercab service nationwide, it’s not even clear that it would be profitable. The challenge is less technological and more economic, Smith said. “If you set aside development and hardware costs, you have the ongoing operational costs,” he said. “How do you compete with a Uber driver who might be making under minimum wage to provide and maintain their own car, to clean it and do all the other services that Waymo and Tesla may ultimately have to pay real people real money to do?” It could also prove difficult to get Americans to give up their personal cars and use only ride sharing, whether human or driverless, Smith said. And even for those who decide to purchase only rides rather than a personal car, “capturing market share in an already-saturated market for ride-hail” will be a challenge, said Anthony Townsend, a senior research associate at Cornell Tech University and author of “Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car.” So far, neither Waymo nor Tesla’s robotaxi service have reported financial results. Waymo has said it sees a “path” to profitability but has not said when that will be achieved. Alphabet includes Waymo under its “Other Bets” segment of the company, which lost $3.9 billion in the first half of this year on revenue of only $793 million, down from $823 million a year earlier. Telsa insists it will have a cost advantage over rivals like Waymo because its cars cost less. It uses only cameras to guide the car, rather than the lasers and radar that are part of Waymo’s driving system. But it has also run into far more problems getting regulatory approval to expand its service. Any driverless car company faces the challenge of a regulatory maze, Townsend said. “It’s also not clear yet which company has the strongest business model,” he said.