Elon Musk reignited the long-running Tesla vs. Waymo autonomy debate this week, saying that Waymo “never really had a chance” against Tesla’s approach to self-driving. The comment came directly in response to Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who highlighted Waymo’s data-driven safety record and its growing lead in fully driverless miles.
Dean pointed to Waymo’s 96 million rider-only autonomous miles and the company’s new technical deep-dive outlining its Foundation Model, closed-loop simulator, critic systems, and its massive, continuously growing bank of real-world driverless data. Waymo says its service has now delivered 14 million paid trips in 2025, is on track to hit 20 million lifetime rides by year-end, and is averaging roughly one million rides per month. The company also expects to scale to one million rides per week in 2026, adding 20 new cities next year, including international expansions to London and Tokyo.
Waymo’s strategy has always been deliberate: enter a city, begin mapping and shadow-mode testing, then slowly ramp from safety-driver rides to fully driverless service as validation progresses. It’s a city-by-city, safety-first approach built around measurable proof rather than broad deployment. Waymo recently expanded testing to four more major U.S. cities as it prepares for its slate of 2026 rollouts.
Tesla, meanwhile, is betting everything on a radically different scaling model. Instead of localized, high-precision mapping and gradual geofenced rollout, Tesla relies on billions of miles of globally collected fleet data from its 6-million-vehicle network. That dataset powers its end-to-end Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, which will theoretically enable Tesla Robotaxis to launch wherever regulators allow service, without the lengthy city-mapping process Waymo requires. Just this week, Musk claimed Tesla has “pretty much solved” unsupervised FSD and promised driverless Robotaxis in Austin in the coming weeks.
Both companies appear to be readying major 2026 expansions, but the philosophical divide has never been sharper: Waymo argues provable safety comes from controlled scaling, while Musk insists that overwhelming data volume and generalization will let Tesla leapfrog every competitor. With Waymo showing unprecedented safety metrics and Tesla pushing toward unsupervised autonomy at a global scale, the contrast sets the stage for the most consequential year yet in autonomous driving.
