Tesla Robotaxi vs Waymo: I Analyzed Real Fleet Data + Future Leader Prediction

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Stick around because in this video I'm going to uncover how Tesla is doing versus Whimo in their robo taxi efforts using real fleet data and I'm going to also project who will likely be the clear leader a few years from now. I'm John and this is Cleaner Watt.

[00:00:23]In the past, since Tesla was not operating a robo taxi service, when I compared Tesla and Whimo, I had to rely on really projecting out Tesla's future based on their technology and how they were approaching full autonomy versus Whimo. However, now that we have realworld robo taxi fleet data for Tesla, we can have an unbiased comparison of how Tesla compares to Whimo right now. So in our comparisons, let's go ahead and start with chapter one, which is a comparison of service areas of Tesla's robo taxi service versus Whimo's. Now, first off, I want to note that Whimo has been in the robo taxi business longer than Tesla. Tesla did not begin any robo taxi operations until June of 2025. Whimo, on the other hand, launched their robo taxi service in December of 2018, so quite a bit earlier than Tesla. Now, the initial launch with Whimo did have safety drivers. However, less than two years later in October of 2020, Whimo did introduce their full rider only driverless service in the Chandler, Arizona area. In the years since then, moving into where we are today in 2026, Whimo now operates in 11 different metro areas. Now, as I mentioned, Tesla first launched their robo taxi service in June of 2025. And that launch happened in the Austin, Texas area with a small invite only fleet with Model Y SUVs being the robo taxis. However, this initial fleet did have safety drivers in the front seat ready to take control of the vehicle at any time if needed. It was not until January of 2026 that Tesla started offering unsupervised rides with no safety driver inside of the vehicle.

[00:02:10]Since then, in April of this year, Tesla launched their unsupervised robo taxi service in Dallas, and Houston as well.

[00:02:17]So, while operates in 11 different metro areas, Tesla operates in four: Austin, the Bay Area, Dallas, and Houston. If you add up the total miles of Whimo versus Tesla when it comes to their service area, Tesla is only 33 miles behind Whimo. Despite offering robo taxi services for a much shorter time and if you add up the total service areas, Tesla operates in 1190 square miles versus,23 square miles for Whimo. Now, while that is exciting, there is a huge caveat here, and that is that in the Bay Area, Tesla still has safety drivers. So, while that area is large for Tesla, those are not unsupervised rides.

[00:03:01]Whereas, when it comes to Whimo, right now, all of the service that Whimo has is unsupervised. There's no safety driver in the vehicle. Now, on a side note, both Tesla and Whimo do have people at their headquarters that monitor these vehicles and can remotely control them if they need to take over for a safety reason. But when it comes to an actual safety driver in the vehicle, all of Whimo's operations right now have no safety driver in the vehicle, at least what they're offering to the public. I'm sure they have tests out there with safety drivers in new localities, but in the areas that they're operating their robo taxi, those are driverless. Whereas, once again, Tesla is only offering these unsupervised rides in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. So really more accurately for this comparison, instead of looking at the total surface area like we did before, if you compare the driverless surface area of Tesla versus Whimo, that equates to somewhere around 300 square miles for Tesla versus,23 square miles for Whimo. So in that particular case, Whimo is far ahead.

[00:04:08]Okay. Beyond that, what about fleet size? How does Tesla's fleet size compare to Whimo? Well, according to robo taxracker.com, which I will link to down in the video description, and I recommend you check out this website because it has great information and it is updated often. But according to this website, which tracks Tesla's robo taxis, Whimo's robo taxis, and also Zuks, it says here that Tesla in Austin has 53 robo taxis. In the Bay Area, Tesla has 551 robo taxis. In Dallas, five, and in Houston, six. However, according to this data, it looks like only 27 of the robo taxis in the Austin area are unsupervised. So, if you look at the total number of unsupervised robo taxis that Tesla is operating right now, that number is around 38. However, Whimo's driverless fleet is quite a bit larger, sitting at a little bit over 3,000. Robo Taxi Tracker pegs their number at 3,67 vehicles in their official fleet. And this number appears to be very accurate because Whimo on their website in February did write here that they were operating a fleet of 3,000 vehicles. So, if you look at total fleet size, including Tesla's vehicles that have safety drivers, their total fleet is over 660 vehicles right now as compared to Whimo that has over 3,000 vehicles once again in their fleet. But when you look at driverless robo taxis only and look at that comparison, Tesla, as of the recording of this video, has around 38 driverless vehicles in their fleet versus Whimo, which once again has over 3,000 driverless vehicles in their fleet. Okay, so we've looked at a comparison of the fleet service area and the number of vehicles in each fleet.

[00:05:56]What about how many driverless miles each company has logged in their service? Well, through December of 2025, Whimo had officially logged over 170 million driverless miles. In addition to that, as of February 6 of 2026, a Whimo blog post noted that that number had climbed to nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles. Tesla, on the other hand, has only been offering their driverless service since January of this year. So, only a few months. And not in every area. Once again, not in the Bay Area and not even every vehicle in the Austin, Texas area. just a portion of those vehicles, approximately 27 vehicles right now in the Austin area.

[00:06:35]And then once again, the five in Dallas and the six in Houston. But nonetheless, when you look at that unsupervised fleet, the amount of miles that Tesla has logged driverless is likely still under 1 million miles accumulatively for Tesla. Another really important comparison is safety. How does the safety of Tesla's robo taxi service compare to Whimo? The first data points for the safety of Tesla's robo taxi service come from a website that I came across roboaxis safety tracker.com.

[00:07:07]And this data is aggregated from NHTSA public data. And note that this data is only for the Austin area. It does not include Dallas, Houston, or the Bay Area. But nonetheless, you can see that Tesla has averaged an incident every 287,270 mi. But currently, Tesla is on a streak of over 563,000 miles since their last incident. There have been 13 total incidents since June of 2025. And they calculate here using these numbers that Tesla's robo taxi service in Austin is 1.7 times worse than human drivers. Now, 1.7 times worse than human drivers is not a number that you want to see for Tesla, but it's important to note that their safety trajectory is going the right way because their current miles per incident streak is much better than the average. And in addition, it's noted here that their safety doubles approximately every 50 days. So Tesla's safety trajectory once again this is for the Austin area is getting much better and should reach human parody very shortly if it has not already. Okay for the second set of data for Tesla's robo taxi safety. This information comes from robo taxracker.com and includes data for Austin and the Bay Area. According to NHTSA incident reports and this data is through March 16th of 2026. There have been a total of 30 incidents reported for Tesla.

[00:08:36]However, it is important to note that if you look at the data here, it looks like most of these were pretty minor with 13 resulting in property damage, nine no injuries, five minor injury, and three unknown. Okay, beyond those two data sources, I do think it's important for Tesla that I go ahead and for context at least bring up the fact that on Tesla's website, they track the safety of their full self-driving supervised. And while this is not for robo taxis, this is a very similar software that they're using in the robo taxis. So, it shows how good the software is. Yes, these vehicles have to be supervised by the driver, but the software is very good and Tesla is using it in a lot of different vehicles.

[00:09:18]But according to Tesla, in full self-driving supervised, Teslas have logged over 10 billion miles. In addition, it's written here, full self-driving supervised keeps you safer, 7x fewer major collisions, 7x fewer minor collisions, and 5x fewer offhighway collisions. All in all, according to Tesla's data here, Tesla vehicles driven with FSD supervised engaged average 5.5 million miles traveled before a major collision and 1.6 million miles driven before a minor collision. Okay, now moving to Whimo.

[00:09:53]When it comes to just the robo taxi service, comparing that to the data we have for Tesla's robo taxi service and incidents, Whimo has way more data. So, a much higher data set than we have for Tesla's pure robo taxi service. And according to robo taxi tracker.com, Whimo has had 693 total incidents reported. But according to this analysis here, which was done by Gemini 3, it appears like that only in around 12% of these accidents, Whimo was at fault. And once again, this data is through March of 2026. So beyond the data from Robbo taxi tracker on Whimo's website they have data here and this data is for quote compared to an average human driver over the same distance in our operating cities. The Whimo driver had 92% fewer serious injury or worse crashes. 83% fewer airbag deployment in any vehicle crashes. 82% fewer injury-causing crashes. 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries. 85% fewer cyclist crashes with injuries. 81% fewer motorcycle crashes with injuries.

[00:10:58]Okay. When it comes to the success of a robo taxi service, I think the cost of the ride matters, especially as there is more competition. For example, as Tesla availability increases, with all things being equal, meaning reliability, safety, and so on, I believe people are going to prefer a lower cost service if it accomplishes the same thing, getting you safely and comfortably from point A to point B. And on that note, Tesla's service is quite a bit lower in cost than Whimo. For example, as this article on ride obi.com shows, at least in the Bay Area of California, Tesla is undercutting Whimo's price by a good margin. The average calculated price listed in this article for a Tesla robo taxi ride was $1149 as compared to Whimo, which was $23.24.

[00:11:49]Tesla's cost per mile was also less than half that of Whimo's. So once again, if you're a consumer looking at two particular products and one cost half as much and accomplishes the same thing, which one are you going to choose? Of course, most people are going to choose the less expensive product that accomplishes the same thing and that's what Tesla is offering right now. So at scale, if Tesla can keep that price low like that, they're going to be undercutting Whimo quite a bit. Okay, now let's take a look at future growth plans for Tesla versus Whimo. So, in Tesla's Q1 2026 investors conference call, Elon Musk said, "We certainly hope to have unsupervised FSD robo taxi operating in, I don't know, a dozen or so states by the end of this year." In the investor slide deck, Tesla listed that preparations were underway in the Phoenix area, in Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, Florida, and also in Las Vegas, Nevada. When it comes to Whimo's expansion plans, they have over 20 different areas listed here on their website that are up next, including two that are not in the USA, London, UK, and also Tokyo, Japan. Okay, now let's examine scalability of Tesla versus Whimo. So, first of all, just looking at vehicle cost, Tesla has a huge advantage when it comes to the cost of each robo taxi. Whether that's a Model Y or a Cyber Cab, Tesla is able to manufacture those for a much lower cost. First of all, because Tesla manufactures the vehicle themselves, they're not paying a markup. But in addition, the hardware is much lower cost because they're just using Tesla vision, whereas Whimo has a number of different sensors, including LiDAR, for example. Right now, Tesla is using Model Y's as robo taxis in their fleet. And we know that they can produce those vehicles for under $35,000. And they have all the hardware necessary at that price for their robo taxi service.

[00:13:42]So they don't have to retrofit those.

[00:13:43]They're ready to go as is. In addition, official production of the cyber cab has begun and that vehicle at scale is going to be even cheaper than the Model Y. It looks like the cost to producing that at scale will be quite a bit under $30,000.

[00:13:59]So, not that much per vehicle for a robo taxi. In the USA right now, it looks like Whimos fleet pretty much consists of Jaguar Ipaces that have been retrofitted. But now that the Ipace is no longer being manufactured, they are going to transition in the near future, adding Zeer RT vans later this year. And at some point in the future, it looks like they plan to add Hyundai Ionic 5s to their fleet. I don't know exactly how much Whimo pays for their vehicles, but Gary Black on X did post some estimations when he wrote here, quote, Whimo's sixth generation Zeers cost 70K to 100K including all hardware software.

[00:14:38]Fifth generation Whimo Jaguar Ipace SUVs were 100K to 130K. So with Tesla's cost per robo taxi being much lower than Whimo, that is a huge advantage when it comes to scalability. Now, beyond just the cost, what about robo taxi manufacturing? Of course, Whimo is not manufacturing their own vehicles, but they do have to retrofit those. For this, Whimo does have a facility in Arizona where they retrofit these vehicles. And in this article that was published May 5th of 2025, so around a year ago, it was written here, quote, Whimo plans to build tens of thousands of vehicles per year at the facility. So that build there is referencing retrofitting, not building new vehicles, but retrofitting the vehicles that they purchase. For example, the Zeer vans or the Hyundai Ionic 5 and previously the Ipace. But they plan to do tens of thousands of vehicles per year. That's a good number, but that's nowhere near Tesla's plans. For example, Tesla produces a large number of Model Y's right now. But more importantly, when it comes to the purpose-built vehicle for the robo taxi service, their cyber cab official production of the cyber cab has begun. And while it might take a little bit for Tesla to fully ramp up, Tesla has huge volume plans for the future. In a Forbes article that I came across, it was written, "Tesla is targeting volume production starting in April 2026 with an internal goal of building one cyber cab every 10 seconds at full scale and an annual capacity of 2 million units."

[00:16:16]So, Whimo on one side wants to retrofit tens of thousands of vehicles every year for their robo taxi service. And Tesla wants to get to 2 million cyber cabs built per year and that doesn't even include the Model Y's that they could add to the fleet. Now, I believe that the Cyber Cab is going to be the main vehicle in their robo taxi fleet, but there always is an option of the Model Y like they're using right now. Okay.

[00:16:38]Under the scalability comparison, I also want to talk about profitability of the robo taxi service and the companies themselves. So Tesla's robo taxi service does have some advantages when it comes to profitability because once again since they build their vehicles in-house with all the hardware necessary for robo taxi service at a much lower cost than Whimo that means right off the bat their hardware is lower cost. In addition Tesla owns a vast charging network. So when it comes to charging these robo taxis they can do that at their own cost. And in addition, in the past, Elon Musk made mention of Tesla owners in the future having the ability to add their own personal vehicles to the robo taxi fleet and earn some money from their vehicle driving people around. So obviously Tesla would get a portion of that revenue and the owner of the vehicle would get a portion of that revenue, but Tesla would not have to actually manage or pay for that vehicle and would just share the revenue. In addition, Tesla has something that Whimo doesn't have, and that's the addition of their full self-driving subscription revenue, which of course does help offset this as well, because this helps pay for improving the full self-driving hardware and software. According to Tesla's Q1 2026 investors presentation, they state here that as of Q1 2026, they have 1.28 million active full self-driving subscriptions. Those subscriptions right now are $99 per month. So if 128 million people have that subscription, that's over $126 million of revenue per month for Tesla or over $1.52 billion per year just from those subscriptions. In addition, Tesla as a larger company is profitable. So I have no doubt that the robo taxi operation once it gets going and it it may be profitable now I have no idea but I believe it's going to be very profitable at scale whereas Whimo right now they are not profitable. I came across this article on om.co that was published February 12th of 2026 and it was written here quote the tricky thing for Whimo is finding a scenario where prices volume competition fleet requirements and cost are all in perfect sync. That is the combination that would make them worth 126 billion or even more. For now, the company is still registering staggering losses.

[00:19:01]Alphabet's other bets segment lost 3.6 billion in Q4 2025 alone. It is hard to figure out what percentage of those losses came from Whimo, but it has to be a substantial chunk since Whimo is the dominant component of the segment. So yes, Whimo is owned by the larger Alphabet Incorporated, which of course Alphabet Incorporated owns Google. So they have a big company that owns them and lots of cash. So I'm not saying that that Alphabet is going to run out of cash, but Whimo is burning a lot of cash right now, whereas I believe Tesla is going to be very profitable if they're not already with the robo taxi service because of the things that I've mentioned. So with that being said, really looking into the future, I believe that in the next few years, Tesla will surpass Whimo in terms of fleet size because they have the plans and ability to build many more robo taxi vehicles than Whimo with a lower cost per vehicle and for the potential of private party vehicles being added to the network in the future. As I mentioned, I believe they'll also surpass Whimo in a few years when it comes to service area, driverless rides, and driverless miles because Tesla does have a lot of full self-driving data from private users cars throughout the USA. And I believe this data is going to be really important as they roll out their robo taxi service to new markets.

[00:20:21]Also, if Tesla is able to operate their robo taxi service at a much lower cost than Whimo, and it appears like they're going to be able to do that, that should allow Tesla to undercut Whimo's price for ride cost, which will make it really difficult for Whimo because of that competition to be profitable. And if they're not profitable, Alphabet, the the parent company, obviously can throw money at it, but eventually Whimo needs to be profitable for it to really scale like it needs to. Do let me know what you think about all this in the comments section below. I'd love to hear from you. I would also like to say thank you to all of those of you who support me through Patreon. Your support does make a big difference and helps make these videos possible. Well, until next time, thanks for watching.