Austin, Texas – The city has emerged as an unexpected frontier in a new era of transportation history, marking the first time two autonomous vehicles from competing companies, Tesla and Waymo, have crossed paths on a public road. A video shared by Anuarbek Imanbaev on X, showing a Tesla Robotaxi and Waymo sharing a road in the middle of Austin, has garnered numerous views.
Tesla and Waymo
The Robotaxi Program, Tesla announced in 2020, when it officially started in Austin on June 22, 2025, operates a small pilot fleet of 10 to 20 vehicles, mostly modified Model Ys. The rides will be by invitation only, and they will be sold at a flat rate of $4.20 as a promotional rate. There is also a monitor who is a Tesla employee sitting on the front passenger seat, but he cannot take control of the vehicle. The system used by Tesla is purely vision-based and does not use either LiDAR or radar, but uses cameras and neural network recording.
On the contrary, Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, has already been on the road in Austin since March 2025. Its fleet of Jaguar I‑PACE cars is completely driverless with a variety of sensors such as LiDAR, radar, and cameras, and is placed into its ride-hailing service, Uber. Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, also wants to bring Tesla into its platform. Waymo has an established safety record on several million miles, and its vehicles have recently been discovered to be much less likely to be involved in accidents than human beings are.
The Safety and Technical Comparisons
The software stack developed by Tesla and marketed as Full Self-Driving (FSD) has long been the source of controversy. Although the company states it is developing a general-purpose autonomous system that can be trained on the basis of significant amounts of data, critics believe that a camera-only setup is less safe because it lacks redundancy in a depth sense.
In fact, in the initial videos of Tesla in Austin, pilot, there have been cases of mismatched driving with erroneous turning and moving on the wrong lane, among others, and have raised the eyebrows of the federal government. U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is now investigating these incidents as part of a wider analysis of the safety of vision-based autonomy.
Meanwhile, Waymo has been gradually growing, informing about safety validation in detail, remote fleet monitoring procedures, and active cooperation with regulators. Its vehicles have no human watch controller on board, and they do not require physical communication, underneath a cloud-based command and control center to be able to respond to edge cases.
Industry Reaction and Public Response
The meeting has created a strong debate in the industry and social networking entities. Whether the Tesla Robotaxi program can be as reliable and scalable as Waymo’s operation is a question that has been discussed by the community on Reddit. The incident has been described by many as symbolic – an overture of what might turn into a grandiose adventure on the future of urban transportation.
Tesla has announced its plans to grow the Robotaxi business in Austin, but also in the San Francisco Bay Area, subject to regulatory approval. Waymo, in its turn, keeps expanding gradually, recently declaring its integration with Uber more deeply in Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Future Roads
Although this “robot vs. robot” fight was short-lived, it highlights one of the critical turning points in the evolution of automated cars. With Tesla, it will be the first introduction of a technology that has long been touted but is being put through its paces. In the case of Waymo, it also underlines its rank as a market leader in terms of safety and scale of operation.
This is the point when Austin may be considered as the beginning of the first real competition-driven age in driverless transportation, as both companies continue to polish their systems and establish operations in more markets.
