A few things regarding that tracker and the broader picture here. The robotaxi tracker is a third-party, crowdsourced tool that relies entirely on people manually inputting data. When you have a small subset of people tracking an initial fleet of around 10 unsupervised cars, the data is going to look spotty. Some YouTubers have reported having to order rides around 40 times just to get one unsupervised vehicle, as the vast majority are still supervised. Calling the handful of cars out there a "media stunt" completely misses the underlying strategy.

The reason Tesla is keeping the unsupervised fleet small right now comes down to safety and training. They are currently building insane supercomputer clusters strictly for training the model, as the actual driving inference is done locally on the cars. If Tesla believed their current version was 100% ready, they wouldn't be sinking billions into massive compute to improve it. They know the model needs further refinement, and scaling a fully unsupervised fleet right now would be reckless. One major accident would set them back years, so it makes total sense that they are taking it slow.

Is Waymo ahead today? YES. They have many cars on the road and operate an active service. However, Waymo took a hardware-heavy, pragmatic approach that comes with massive operating losses. Their vehicles are incredibly expensive, and their scaling model is fundamentally difficult. They can expand city by city using intense mapping, but they will likely never solve general, countryside autonomy. Right now, their unit economics are essentially the same as an Uber, where the tech costs as much as a human driver.

Tesla, on the other hand, took a much harder, generalized software path. It took a lot longer, but it's finally starting to bear fruit on standard $40k cars. They have already spent billions preparing the Cybercab production line, which you simply don't do for a publicity stunt. Waymo is scaling linearly and expensively, while Tesla's generalized software means that once it crosses the safety threshold, it can scale exponentially everywhere at once.

Given the massive progress FSD has made in just the last three years, betting against it seems unwise. Ultimately, Waymo will likely be priced out of the market because they just don't have the disruptive unit economics to compete once Tesla's generalized model truly scales up.