Tesla vs Waymo self-driving test has FSD 13 arriving at the destination way earlier

While Alphabet's Waymo self-driving car service cites 17,000 miles covered between interventions, while Tesla is on its way to pass the 10,000-mile count soon, a brief test of its FSD feature against Waymo has put Tesla's autonomous driving solution ahead.

It took a Tesla driving on FSD V13.2 just 15 minutes and 40 seconds to cover a preset route with the same start and end point as the Waymo vehicle, which, however, took 43 minutes to do the same.

That's nearly three times longer than on FSD 13, and the Tesla car experienced "fewer awkward moments" at that. A brief watch of the Tesla FSD vs Waymo comparison video tells why, despite all the extra hardware equipment like LiDAR, the Waymo vehicle took longer.

That's mainly because it can't take highways, but also because it was way more hesitant when merging into traffic, or slow to make maneuvers that FSD 13 did with more confidence and flexibility, despite relying on Tesla Vision cameras only.

Moreover, Waymo operates in a geofenced area that is about 40 square miles large, and just announced its expansion into Miami, while Tesla's FSD isn't geofenced and works on highways as well.

With the expansion of its AI server clusters from the current 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 20,000 Tesla chips, the miles count between interventions is bound to increase significantly as soon as next year. Tesla is so certain of this, that Elon Musk said it plans to launch unsupervised FSD for existing vehicles in 2025, followed by the launch of its driverless Cybercab two-seater in 2026, pending regulatory approval.

If FSD 13.2 is any indication, Tesla is well on the way to that goal in terms of technology, and is making steps to win regulatory approval, while Musk's recent appointment as a lead of the newly minted Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may also help. Musk is on record saying that DOGE will also be used to clear the red tape before autonomous vehicles on federal level, so that Tesla can put the Robotaxi on city streets faster.

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