Waymo’s Doubling Its Fleet, Doubling Its Cash, and Doubling Down on Tesla’s L’s

I honestly can’t remember the last time anyone brought up the Tesla Robotaxi without it turning into a meme about some poor intern hovering over the killswitch like their f***ing mortgage depended on it. Elon’s been dangling this “fleet of autonomous Teslas making you passive income while you sleep” fantasy since, like, the Obama administration. At this point, he’s the boy who cried Robotaxi… except instead of wolves, it’s just another dumb tweet about how it’ll be ready “next year.”

Meanwhile, Waymo is out here absolutely dog-walking Tesla in the robotaxi race. Alphabet’s robotaxi arm just announced Denver and Seattle are next in line for testing. Yeah, they still got safety drivers in Jaguars and Geely Zeekrs for now, but that’s just the warmup. The plan is test, then validate, then go full ghost ride. And unlike Elon’s vaporware, Waymo has already pulled this off in Phoenix, LA, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta. Meaning, normal-ass people are already getting picked up in cars with no drivers while Tesla’s big accomplishment is… a permit in Texas. Big whoop.

The numbers are where this whole “Waymo vs. Tesla” thing stops being a rivalry and starts looking like Cowboys vs. Eagles in 2025. Sure, it used to be close 4 years ago, but now? Not even the same weight class (especially without Micah Parsons).

(Source: Sherwood News)

Waymo’s rolling with 2,000 vehicles across five major markets and pulling in 300,000 paid rides a week. If you do the math, that’s $6 million in revenue weekly. And they’re not done… they plan to more than double the fleet next year. Even Lyft’s looking over like, “damn, our retention rate just got cooked.” Its user base skews wealthier with 65% making over $100k a year. That’s the kind of demo advertisers salivate over. No wonder Vinod Khosla (billionaire VC, Sun Microsystems co-founder, and all-around “I bet big on weird sh*t” guy) is out here saying Waymo could be a multi-trillion-dollar business, maybe even bigger than Google ads if Alphabet decides to “floor it.”

Tesla, on the other side of the garage, well they’ve got… a permit in Texas. Sick, bro. They’re still testing in Austin and San Francisco with humans in the front seat. Compare that to Waymo giving a blind guy a fully autonomous ride in 2015, and Elon’s “your Model 3 will pay your rent while you sleep” dream looks less legit than the scammer text I just received about a remote job that pays $2,000 an hour.

And yeah, the public isn’t totally sold on robotaxis. Only about a third of Californians say they feel good about them, and activist groups are quick to dunk on every mistake. But Waymo can point to the receipts: its cars have been involved in 88% fewer serious-injury accidents than human drivers. Meanwhile, Tesla is still letting Chad from Austin ride shotgun just to babysit “autonomy.”

So no, this isn’t a rivalry anymore. Waymo is stacking wins, expanding into tougher cities, and actually putting asses in seats. Tesla? Still tailgating in the parking lot, talking about how they’ll “dominate next season.” And until Elon shows some sort of proof that Tesla can compete, it’s hard to put both companies in even the same conversation.

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