Lifestyle
Does the Tesla Network have any serious self-driving competitors?
Elon Musk has made it clear that the Tesla Network’s potential is no joke.
“The fundamental utility of your vehicle will increase by a factor of 5,” he told the audience during Tesla’s Investor Autonomy Day earlier this year. Then, during a broad investor call in May, he reportedly said that self-driving would give Tesla a $500 billion dollar market cap with vehicles worth up to $250,000 in the next few years thanks to their Robotaxi capabilities. Each car will be capable of doing about 100 hours of self-driving hours of work per week to their owners’ benefit. Musk’s even more astounding prediction was that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip and real-time development data being fed by current vehicles on the road will lead to some 1 million Robotaxi-capable Tesla cars by next year.
Of course, Tesla isn’t the only company vying for autonomous taxi riders. Is there anything Tesla Network competitors are supposed to do that gives them a competitive edge? I’ve become curious recently and decided to have a look. These kinds of questions can’t be left unanswered, you know!
Waymo is probably one of the most well known Robotaxi companies making headway in the self-driving arena. Their vehicle program aims to “help…people run errands, commute to work…[and]…drop off kids at school,” among other things shown on the company’s website. I’m seeing lots of family focus in their marketing, and Waymo’s pitch even includes giving elderly and disabled people more mobility options. It’s all very ‘feel good’ and great, but not quite distinct from what Tesla aims to do with the Robotaxi. I mean, just owning a Tesla will provide those capabilities, and if you don’t own one, you can rent one to do all those tasks just the same.
Next, there’s Uber, whose self-driving cars are part of the company’s ultimate goal of becoming the “one-stop shop for the movement of people and powering local commerce around the world,” according to its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Actually, Uber is totally banking on the Robotaxi concept for survival. Former CEO Travis Kalanick made some comments to that effect in 2016. “What would happen if…we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by, basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way,” he told Business Insider in an interview.
Uber is definitely taking aim at a similar audience as the Tesla Network, or the ride-hailers anyway. The biggest difference between the two companies, however, is the assumption by Uber that people will gradually move away from vehicle ownership altogether, including the people it currently pays to drive other people around. Drivers are expensive! So, Uber hopes to get rid of them in favor of a fleet of company-owned autonomous vehicles.
Elon Musk has argued that this semi-traditional one owner, one gazillion cars approach is unwieldy. Also, if a certain percentage of those riders are financially capable of owning an autonomous car, why would they pay Uber to constantly hitch rides when their own car could do the same thing and earn that money for themselves? Well, that’s the point of the Tesla Network. If people are taking privately-owned self-driving cars from place to place via a company like Uber, why wouldn’t they be a private owner themselves if given access to a connective network?
Lyft is more or less in the same boat as Uber on this, but with a twist. They’ve recently begun offering Waymo rides via their app in Phoenix, Arizona, which is a pretty cool development for the future of Robotaxis. It does have a similarity with the Tesla Network in that Waymo’s vehicles are privately owned by someone other than the ride sharing app provider. If, say, Tesla owners could put their cars onto the Lyft app for service, there would be a one-to-one similarity with the Tesla Network. That doesn’t look like it’s Lyft’s preferred approach, though, as the company is developing its own self-driving system. Perhaps there will be a mixed approach? I’m sure Tesla will take note of competing connectivity apps and have incentives to purchase a Tesla for Robotaxi duties over other self-driving cars.
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Tesla does, of course, intend to compete directly with Uber and Lyft in ways outside of private owners on its network. “Tesla will for sure operate its own ride-hailing service. We’ll compete directly with Uber and Lyft, obviously. There will be a company-owned fleet where there aren’t enough customer cars to be rented out. So if we find in a particular metro (where) there aren’t enough customers who are willing to add their car to the shared fleet, that’s where we’d supplant with the company-owned fleet,” Elon Musk said during the company’s Q3 call in 2018.
Waymo’s fully self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan on public roads. | Image: Waymo
GM Cruise might be building vehicles that could be competitive in something akin to the Tesla Network. Their cars are purpose-built to be self-driven, similar to how Tesla’s cars are built electric from the ground up, and it looks like there could be individual ownership instead of only company ownership. There’s a big disadvantage for GM Cruise, though. They’re not Tesla.
Musk’s famous goal with the company was to build an amazing car that just happened to be electric, and he’s succeeded on an incredible scale which has been recognized by test agencies and auto publications time and time again. I’d argue that GM will have to have something either much more appealing or much less expensive than a Tesla if they want to eventually compete with a future Tesla Network of private owners. Otherwise, they’re in the boat with Uber and Lyft and competing with millions of Robotaxi-capable… Teslas.
What about chip companies that are developing self-driving solutions? Any good ideas there?
NVIDIA looks to be developing super amazing computing hardware and software for automotive brands to license for their own vehicles rather than developing in-house. Considering the expenditure a self-made system requires, this isn’t surprising, and even Tesla (i.e., Musk) was criticized for deciding to go this route for the Full Self-Driving computer. NVIDIA’s partners, however, look to be interested in owner-initiated self-driving rather than a money making capability in and of itself, i.e., regular drivers using their cars for regular things. Aurora, too, is developing their own autonomous driving system with the intention of licensing it to other partners in the hopes that their product will become the “nerve center” of self-driving vehicles, but nothing that gives their Robotaxi capabilities a nudge over Tesla.
It goes without saying that the software and technology needs to build a successful AI are significant, and a car maker will probably save a lot of money using someone else’s system initially. Perhaps those companies could use Aurora’s or NVIDIA’s system to keep themselves in the running or catch them up for a while where they’ve fallen behind consumer demand. There’s just one problem, though, for legacy auto companies doing the catching up – they’re not all electric.
In his Autonomy Day remarks, Musk wasn’t very kind about Tesla’s gas-guzzling brethren and their Robotaxi hopes. Any non-electric venture will not be competitive, he said flatly. Considering Tesla’s battery upgrades giving them a 1 million mile life cycle and the lower cost of plugging in for juice vs. filling up, this makes sense even without a deep analysis (although Musk has done plenty of that for sure).
Between Robotaxi competitors not making the case for single-party ownership of self-driving fleets and the low cost of electric vehicle taxis, Musk certainly seems to be right about the whole “buying any car besides a Tesla is like buying a horse” thing. I’m not seeing the case for another brand’s strategy having more benefit than the Tesla Network for those who own Tesla vehicles.
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How about you?
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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