10:18 12-12-2025

Tesla vs Waymo in autonomous driving: LiDAR vs vision and real-world results

Elon Musk set off a fresh social‑media clash: after a recent call to abolish the European Union, he pivoted to autonomous driving and criticized Waymo, a Google company. The spark was a post from Google DeepMind chief Jeff Dean, who described Waymo as the market’s most advanced and widely deployed use of AI. Musk countered that, in his view, Waymo never really stood a chance against Tesla.

The figures, though, point the other way. Waymo has already logged more than 160 million kilometers of fully driverless trips, while Tesla’s robotaxis operate only under the watch of safety operators and the tally of autonomous rides is effectively zero. Musk says he plans to remove those overseers from the Austin fleet in the coming weeks, but industry outlets treat that promise cautiously amid videos showing Tesla EVs with beta software violating traffic rules and requiring human intervention. Confidence is easier to post than to prove on public roads.

The core technical divide is unchanged: Waymo leans on LiDAR and a rich sensor suite; Tesla pursues a camera‑only vision approach. Tesla’s path is cheaper and, in theory, easier to scale across its lineup, yet for now it draws more questions from regulators and safety experts. The contrast highlights a bet between redundancy and minimalism, and today the conversation is shaped less by bravado than by logged driverless kilometers and how consistently the cars behave.