Musk declares Tesla's robotaxi race against Waymo won — but Waymo still drives about 7x more
From the Robots digest for Oct 27, 2026
What happened: Electrek reported on October 27 that Musk said Tesla's robotaxi race against Waymo "was never a real contest," after Tesla's driverless fleet in Austin logged 438,000 miles in a single week — edging past the 406,000 weekly average Electrek attributes to Waymo in that city, a figure that is four months old. Across the whole US, Electrek counts Waymo driving about seven times more driverless miles than Tesla every week.
What's genuinely new: The fleet's first direct head-to-head mileage readout against Waymo — a concrete Austin deployment number (438,000 miles in a week) resting on a stale city benchmark, with a national gap that still runs against Tesla — landing the same day a Tesla executive acknowledged building robotaxis faster than the company can deploy them.
Watch: A refreshed Waymo figure for Austin to replace the four-month-old benchmark; whether Tesla's weekly mileage compounds as the Cybercab line scales; and how the open NHTSA FMVSS self-certification audit and the October 12 school-zone defect petition treat a fleet being marketed on mileage.
Sources Electrek