Project
Tesla's purpose-built two-seat robotaxi without steering wheel or pedals, unveiled in 2024 and entering employee public-road rides in Austin.
Autonomous vehicle safety cases rest on crash comparisons with human drivers, but exclusive OSHA data reported by TechCrunch carries a second injury count: the sprains and whiplash logged by the test drivers training the cars.
Reality
Tesla's new first responder guidance makes a company employee on a support line part of the emergency scene. A former fire chief says the extra steps land on an officer who is still working out what happened.
Reality
Rajat Gupta of JPMorgan gives the customer-supplied Tesla Network $5 billion of his $320 billion 2035 robotaxi forecast, and the other $314 billion rides on cars Tesla buys with its own capital. Waymo runs the same structure.
Reality
A special order dated September 10 puts 21 questions to Tesla about how it decided which federal safety standards apply to a car with no steering wheel or pedals. An incomplete answer can cost about $139 million.
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JPMorgan lifted its Tesla price target from $145 to $475 while moving the stock only to neutral. Its $320 billion robotaxi projection for 2035 runs almost entirely through cars Tesla builds and owns itself.
Reality
ARK Invest counts Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi mileage at 1 million, up from 380,000 six weeks earlier, and puts the Cybercab's Austin fare about half of Uber's, a price whoever owns the car has to clear.
Reality
Alphabet's robotaxi arm spent years letting its trip counts do the talking. Last week it published a technical case that camera-only, end-to-end driving is not safe enough, timed a week ahead of a two-seater with no steering wheel.
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The blog post and Axios interview landed a week before Tesla's Cybercab event, and the same Tuesday morning Waymo added three markets, putting deployment scale behind an argument written for regulators.
Reality
A steering-wheel-free Cybercab rolling empty through Austin is an argument about build cost rather than mileage, since the 380,000 unsupervised miles Tesla claims sit at under 2% of Waymo's logged total.
Reality
Waymo's software VP never names Tesla in his 200-million-mile post, but it arrives as the Cybercab does, and New Jersey is already weighing a bill that would write sensor redundancy into the law deciding who can operate.
Reality
A 15-cent-per-mile fee earmarked for transit and displaced workers is not a permit condition. It is a price, and the DC Council has shown it can set one.
Reality
Robotaxi Tracker says every Austin ride it logged over two weeks ran unsupervised, seven months after Musk said the monitors were gone. The instrument is one person's crowdsourced site.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The Transportation Authority's interim order caps the Strip fleet at 10, bars airport pick-ups and requires human supervision. Zoox's three million logged miles set the template.
Reality