Everyone’s Hyped Over TSLA’s Robotaxi… No One’s Talking About the Red Flag Waymo Solved in 2018

I have to get this off my chest. And yeah, I know barely anyone else is talking about it… aside from a few brave souls buried in the back corners of the internet. To those folks: salute. But seriously… call me a hater, call me a buzzkill, call me whatever you want… just don’t call what Tesla just did a “robotaxi launch.”

On Sunday, Elon Musk did what only Elon Musk can do: probably fathered another child, hijacked the spotlight, melted Twitter, and gave Wall Street the kind of dopamine spike that makes TikTok feel like reading War and Peace. Tesla announced a pilot “robotaxi” program in Austin, and the market reacted like he just cracked the laws of physics. The stock jumped. Everyone clapped. Analysts nodded like bobbleheads in a wind tunnel. But here’s the wild part: they didn’t actually launch a robotaxi service.

What Tesla actually rolled out was a couple dozen Model Ys running their latest “Supervised Full Self-Driving” software. Keyword: supervised. Each ride includes a Tesla employee sitting in the front passenger seat, hand hovering over a janky kill switch disguised as a door button… basically there to save the car (and you) from an AI brain fart. It's less cutting-edge tech and more driver’s ed throwback. You know those training cars where the instructor can slam the brakes if you try to take a left into oncoming traffic? Yeah, that.

Now, while all that was happening in Austin (across the country and across the entire spectrum of actual progress) Waymo quietly launched fully driverless service in Atlanta. No kill switches. No safety drivers. No influencer guest list. Just a robotaxi that shows up when you hit a button in the Uber app. It picks you up, drives you across town, and drops you off… all without a single human in the vehicle. No fuss. No flash. Just autonomy actually working in the real world.

And this isn’t some new one-off. Waymo’s already up and running in San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, and even Austin (yes, the same city where Tesla’s robotaxis still need babysitters). But Atlanta is a big step. It’s a complex city with chaotic traffic, weird intersections, and no shortage of variables that would confuse even seasoned human drivers. And Waymo’s vehicles are just… handling it. Silently. Consistently.

Through its partnership with Uber, you can now hail a fully autonomous Jaguar I-PACE in a huge portion of the city. This isn’t some tech demo. It’s a real product. A real service. Not a beta test. Not a flashy PR stunt.

Waymo’s vehicles aren’t just out there for show… they’re logging hundreds of thousands of paid rides every single week. And they’re doing it with lidar, radar, and a mountain of engineering built around safety and redundancy. Meanwhile, Tesla is still betting the farm on camera vision alone, hoping their AI doesn’t glitch and accidentally swerve into a Chili’s. One approach is cautious and proven. The other is… Elon yelling “Trust me” from a SpaceX launch pad.

And somehow, despite all that, Tesla gets the glory. Waymo gets ignored like Alphabet’s awkward second cousin no one mentions at family dinner. Why? Because Tesla has Elon Musk… the guy who once promised we'd all be living on Mars and named his kid something that looks like a Wi-Fi password. Alphabet has Sundar Pichai. Great guy. Smart CEO. But he’s not going on Joe Rogan to talk about merging with AI or building brain chips in his garage.

Tesla trades like a company building the Matrix. Alphabet trades like it’s still selling banner ads on Blogger. And yet, as Samuel Rines at WisdomTree put it: “People are underestimating Waymo in a pretty significant way, while overestimating Tesla.”

Look, I’m not anti-Tesla. Watching their robotaxi demo is fun… in the same way watching a toddler wobble around on a balance bike is fun. There's potential. It’s cute. But they’re not leading the race. They're showing up six years late and still need a grown-up in the car. Meanwhile, Waymo is already scaling. Already charging. Already functioning. And still, most people are too distracted by the Musk show to notice.

So sure, celebrate the Tesla hype. But if you're looking for who’s actually driving the future of autonomy? My money’s on the company whose robotaxis don’t come with a panic button and a babysitter in the front seat.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Tesla, Uber, and Google as mentioned in the article.