Why Waymo Autonomous Driving Has Already Succeeded, But Smart Money Still Bets All Its Chips on Tesla?

TradingKey - As a high-certainty pioneer in the Robotaxi field, Waymo's mature autonomous driving technology has long been recognized by the market. However, this does not mean it is favored by market capital. Given its clear growth prospects, its macro narrative is largely established. Due to Waymo's high maturity, "smart money" can hardly find the outsized returns it seeks here, leading it to shift its focus to Tesla (TSLA) .

Why is Waymo's autonomous driving considered a success?

If the standard is "whether driverless, commercially viable autonomous driving services have been implemented in real urban environments," then Waymo is currently the only true success in any meaningful sense globally.

Furthermore, Waymo no longer needs to prove its technical feasibility; it is operating an autonomous driving transportation network. Investors' attention is focused on whether an alternative path exists—one that is lower-cost, more scalable, and can be replicated worldwide like software.

In reality, however, replicating such a large-scale Robotaxi system is not an overnight task. The "multi-sensor fusion" it employs requires extensive testing and validation, making it difficult to replicate across different scenarios in a short timeframe. Nevertheless, in terms of commercial operation, Waymo is indeed the current leader.

Why is there uncertainty surrounding Tesla's Robotaxi?

The fundamental reason why Tesla's Robotaxi is highly uncertain is that it is betting on a "technical route that has yet to be proven viable and a commercial closed-loop that has yet to be validated."

From a technical perspective, Tesla insists on using pure vision and end-to-end neural networks to approach "human-like general driving intelligence." This means the system does not ensure controllability through rules, maps, and engineering constraints, but rather achieves statistically correct behavior through large-scale data training.

Once the technology matures, it can theoretically replicate its training model rapidly at a low marginal cost, thereby forming a commercial network with significant economies of scale. However, the problem is equally clear: in the context of highly complex real-world traffic environments where edge cases are difficult to exhaustively account for, whether this technical paradigm can consistently reach safety levels acceptable to regulators and the public still lacks sufficient engineering validation and long-term statistical proof.

Today's FSD still requires human intervention at any time, indicating that there may be a significant threshold between the current system and "full self-driving capable of assuming legal liability." As long as this threshold remains uncrossed, Robotaxis cannot be cleared by regulators and will remain commercially unviable.

Even if the technical path is proven feasible, Robotaxi is not simply a matter of "software deployment." It involves vehicle liability attribution, the restructuring of insurance systems, the definition of legal responsibility for accidents, urban regulatory maneuvering, and the establishment of public trust—none of which are variables Tesla can resolve unilaterally through engineering speed.

In other words, it is not that Tesla's Robotaxi is not advanced; rather, its success depends on the simultaneous alignment of three factors: technical breakthroughs, regulatory frameworks, and social acceptance. A delay or obstacle in any one of these areas would prevent Tesla's Robotaxi from materializing. This is why the capital market, while granting it immense room for imagination, must also acknowledge that it remains essentially a high-uncertainty bet.

Why do investors still believe in Tesla's autonomous driving technology?

Investors' choice to still believe in Tesla's autonomous driving technology is not fundamentally because its current technical maturity leads all competitors, but because the capital market never evaluates "who is doing the best right now," but rather "who is most likely to define the ultimate form."

Regarding autonomous driving, Waymo has proven that driverless operations are possible within restricted areas using high-cost engineering solutions. However, this has not solved a larger problem: how to expand this capability globally, to hundreds of millions of vehicles, and across diverse road environments and usage scenarios at a cost approaching that of software replication.

Tesla's narrative is pinned exactly on this point—it is not working on a city-by-city autonomous driving project, but rather attempting to train a "general driving intelligence" that can generalize across the real world, utilizing its global production fleet to continuously acquire real-world data and form a self-reinforcing flywheel.

As long as this logic holds theoretically, even if the probability of success is not high, the commercial returns and industrial restructuring potential that would follow a successful implementation far exceed what any Robotaxi operating company could offer. This determines its inherent "trading time for space" characteristic in the eyes of the capital market.

In other words, what investors believe in is not that Tesla has already solved autonomous driving, but that it represents a path that, if proven successful, would rewrite the cost structure and asset forms of the entire transportation system. In the logic of venture capital and growth stock pricing, this possibility itself is sufficient to support long-term premiums and patience.