Waymo takes a shot at Tesla’s self-driving: it’s a ‘false summit’

This is a self-driving car story, not a home energy topic, so it doesn't affect any upgrade or rebate decision for your house. Still, here's what happened: Waymo, the robotaxi company, published a list of "AI lessons" from its 200 million-plus fully driverless miles, and several of them read as a pointed critique of Tesla's approach to self-driving, even though Tesla is never named.

The main jab is that turning a driver-assist system into full self-driving is a "false summit" — meaning it looks like progress but doesn't actually get you to true autonomy. Waymo also argues that cameras alone can't safely deliver full autonomy, unlike its own mix of cameras, radar, and a laser-based sensor called lidar, and that "black box" AI systems that go straight from camera images to steering commands can't build public trust. These are all seen as direct contrasts with Tesla's camera-only, software-driven approach to its Full Self-Driving system.

The numbers back up Waymo's confidence: it's running more than 500,000 paid driverless rides a week and aims for a million by year's end, while Tesla's robotaxi service remains small and still uses human safety monitors, having logged only 380,000 "unsupervised" miles in over a year. None of this changes anything about home solar, heat pumps, or efficiency rebates — it's simply a look at how the two companies' self-driving strategies compare.