If you go to the Tesla website, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia and New Zealand are already among the countries where the FSD or total self-driving function is available. Drivers who pay an extra amount when purchasing their Tesla and pay a subscription can call their vehicle to go alone from the farthest place in the parking lot to pick them up at the supermarket entrance like an invisible parking ballet, it also drives for them at high speeds on the highway without them having to touch the pedals or the steering wheel and parks for them. cord and battery, which makes things a lot easier for drivers who don't have a good sense of space or coordination, qualities that I think anyone in charge of a 1.7-ton machine that accelerates like a sports car and practically any car should have.

Tesla is not the only car brand that wants to achieve full autonomy in its vehicles, there are many established companies and brands such as Honda, Mercedes and General Motors, but Tesla and Waymo are the most established contenders that are already allowed to circulate on streets and highways among the rest of the guinea pigs or drivers and pedestrians.

These two brands compete to dominate the autonomous vehicle market, these two companies intend to achieve their goal through very different paths, on the one hand, Waymo is a subsidiary company of Alphabet, the owner of Google, which develops and operates commercial robotaxis, these taxis are already operating in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Austin and in December 2025 they made 450,000 trips per week. Through agreements with well-established automobile manufacturers such as Chrysler, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota and Lexus. Wimo acquires hybrid vehicles to transform them into robotaxis and as of 2021 it began to collaborate with the Chinese electric vehicle company Zeekr.

These chubby robotaxis are basically computers on wheels with powerful Nvidia graphics cards that are used to process a lot of information, as you can see, this robotaxi is full of sensors up to the literal crest, it has a crest, it is full of cameras and it also has leading equipment and radar, the cameras give it a complete 360º view of its around.

The infrared Lidar that, by bouncing off the surfaces of objects, people and vehicles, builds a three-dimensional model of its surroundings up to 300 meters away and the radar allows you to track the direction and speed at which everything moves, even in conditions of poor visibility. This allows it to have an impeccable record. Despite those 450,000 trips per week, no injuries have been reported during the operation of Waymo robotaxis other than in incidents where the fault lies with other drivers or the user does something reckless, such as in February 2025, when a cyclist was hospitalized after being hit by a Waymo passenger who opened the door without looking.

But Tesla decided to go another way, the path of lowering costs, Lidar and radar equipment are essential because they expand the information that the computer uses to understand its environment and drive safely, but they are very expensive. So, to expand his profit margin, Elon Musk tries to convince the public that these expensive but important sensors are not necessary.

While Teslas are equipped with only eight cameras to understand their entire environment and drive, they previously had ultrasonic sensors like those that some car models have had for decades, but in 2023 Elon decided that they were also unnecessary, $20 sensors are apparently too luxurious to be equipped in vehicles that do not fall below $40,000 and as a consequence accidents will increase.

The safety of Tesla drivers and more importantly of other drivers and people on foot on the streets depends on eight cameras, and if you are looking for the cheapest webcam, even that camera will have more resolution than the cameras of a Tesla of 1280 by 960 pixels and this bet by Elon Musk of using only cameras has proven to be much less safe. Until the first week of January in which I made this publication, since the introduction of the autonomous system, there have been 65 fatalities in incidents of Tesla vehicles with the self-driving system activated.

And, if you think about it, by allowing it to circulate in self-driving mode in cities and roads that are public, the company is being allowed to use public roads as a training ground for its self-driving technology at the expense of us, the guinea pigs, Tesla vehicles limited by their cameras only to visual information, will never be smart and safe enough to let them drive alone without supervision and therefore their vehicles will never be truly autonomous.

So Waymo using more sensors and without victims or injuries so far seems to have the self-driving issue completely resolved. Does this mean that it has already won this competition? Not necessarily, Waymo is currently operating at a loss and has that luxury because it is backed by Google money, but it faces a very big obstacle, the weather. Waymo operates only in the southern part of the United States, where there is a lot of sun and almost no rain, and when it is raining everything is different. Information from cameras, lidar and radar becomes unreliable.

This year Waymo will start a pilot program in London, a city where it rains 150 days a year and that test will surely decide if the idea of ​​self-driving cars will ever make sense, I hope you learned something, like that if you have a Tesla and you use self-driving if something goes wrong, Tesla will do its best to incriminate only you.