SAN FRANCISCO — Every time a Tesla drove by the company’s downtown showroom earlier this month, protesters raised and waved angry signs directed at Elon Musk.
But when a Waymo robotaxi passed the same corner, no one reacted. The company’s leaders, after all, are not moonlighting as President Donald Trump’s government-slashing right-hand man.
That difference in reputation could shape the fates of Tesla and Waymo as they prepare to compete head-to-head for the first time.
Tesla says it will release its first robotaxis on the streets of Austin in June. Meanwhile, Waymo is already offering rides in Austin, along with San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and it plans to expand next year to Atlanta, Miami and Washington.
Both companies are asking the public for an extraordinary leap of trust: surrendering the steering wheel to a computer.
“When it comes to driving, people want to feel in control,” said Farnoush Reshadi, a business professor who studies consumer psychology at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “A lot of people even have trouble relinquishing trust to a human driver.”
While Waymo is gaining that trust, Musk is angering many of the people who used to trust Tesla most.
“I’m against Musk. If he wasn’t involved with Tesla, I wouldn’t be here,” said Michael Misenti, 70, who sat on the corner of Van Ness Avenue and O’Farrell Street with a sign planted in front of him. It read, “Boycott Tesla and X,” referring to the social media platform that Musk owns.
Misenti was attending a regular weekly protest outside of Tesla’s downtown San Francisco showroom. In the months since Trump took office with Musk by his side, protesters have chanted outside of Tesla showrooms, while vandals have shot through dealership windows and firebombed vacant Tesla vehicles.
Usually attended by dozens of people, the turnout at the San Francisco location was low on the first Saturday in April because many of the regulars were drawn to a much larger anti-Trump rally being held nearby at City Hall — where plenty of fury against Musk was on display.
Alongside the placards protesting Trump were many handmade signs with quips like “Elon Begone,” “No Kings — Ditch Tesla” and “Muskrats are an invasive species.”
But Tesla could also benefit from the Trump administration’s moves. Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced new rules on self-driving, which observers said could favor Tesla and disadvantage Waymo.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s business is growing. The company says it is booking 250,000 paid rides a week, with so far positive reviews from new riders.
“I haven’t met a person who’s used one that doesn’t have a positive opinion,” said one commenter on a story about a poll showing wider robotaxi acceptance.
Tesla’s sales in California dropped 15 percent in the first quarter, according to the California New Car Dealers Association. Polls show that solid majorities of Americans disapprove of Musk’s work leading the Trump administration’s budget- and staff-slashing efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Tesla’s and Musk’s plunging popularity — and Waymo’s rise — come as research suggests that robotaxis face a yawning gap in trust.
A study earlier this year by the American Automobile Association found that only 13 percent of Americans trust riding in a self-driving vehicle.
“It’s evident that today’s drivers value features that enhance their safety,” said Greg Brannon, the automotive engineering director at AAA.
Face-off in Austin
Both Tesla and Waymo began in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades ago, founded by young tech entrepreneurs who aimed to overthrow the status quo.
Tesla was founded in 2003 by two business partners as an electric automaker. Musk became their biggest financial backer, then pushed the pair aside and set Tesla on its course to become the country’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles.
Waymo grew in 2005 from a project at Stanford University. A team of young academics fielded entrants in self-driving “grand challenges” held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Some project leaders were hired by Google to stand up Waymo in 2009 as a provider of self-driving vehicle technology.
Musk has since moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas — and ended friendships with Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Until now, Tesla and Waymo haven’t been direct competitors because they have, for the most part, pursued different opportunities.
Tesla’s main business is making electric vehicles. Musk has been promising for a decade that those vehicles would drive themselves without human intervention but has not yet delivered. Meanwhile, Waymo has developed technology that makes other manufacturers’ cars into robotaxis.
In Austin later this year, the two companies that started as complements to each other are on course to compete directly for customers.
Musk has pledged that this summer, a tiny fleet of 10 or 20 Tesla robotaxis will operate in Texas’s capital city, which is also home to the company’s headquarters. Waymo beat Tesla to the punch when it launched a robotaxi service last month in a partnership with Uber.
The rivalry has high stakes because Musk now describes Tesla as an autonomy and robot provider, rather than an EV-maker. Along with a humanoid robot called Optimus, Tesla is developing its “Cybercab” robotaxi, which is promised to arrive next year. One sign of Musk’s seriousness: The Cybercab prototype has neither steering wheel nor pedals, meaning no one could drive the car if they tried.
Musk’s breakout business successes — at Tesla as an EV maker and a producer of stationary batteries, and at SpaceX with its reusable rockets — were where Tesla had a first-mover advantage. It created new products where it could be the first name.
In Waymo, Musk faces a competitor that has a well-known name and a long lead.
In robotaxis, Waymo is the undisputed leader. Its robotaxis are in real-time use in multiple cities, with no one in the driver’s seat. No other provider comes close.
Other competitors are piloting vehicles, such as Amazon’s Zoox, which is doing trial runs in Las Vegas and San Francisco. But neither Tesla, Zoox nor any startup are yet taking rides for hire. They are also not permitted to do so by the cities and states in which they’re operating.
But competition is rising.
Last week, Uber announced that starting next year, it would offer commercial robotaxi service in Los Angeles, using Volkswagen’s new electric minivan, the ID. Buzz.
Virtually all robotaxis in development in the U.S. are also electric vehicles. The main reason, experts say, is the EV’s prodigious onboard power. The computers and sensors in a self-driving vehicle are electricity-hungry and would overwhelm a traditional car’s starter battery.
Different approaches
Waymo and Tesla have starkly different cultures, leaders, approaches to technological development, and relationships to the customer — any of which could reverberate as they become head-to-head competitors.
Musk’s approach to new products is to set an ambitious timeline to excite the public and galvanize his teams into action. While the deadline almost always slips, the result is often success: Tesla broke the mold by creating appealing, long-range electric vehicles that can be updated remotely and a Supercharger network to recharge them. Its Model Y is the world’s best-selling car.
But Musk’s promise of full self-driving has proved elusive.
In 2015, Musk said that Teslas would be able to navigate with no human intervention by 2018. Today, the company is still working toward that goal, and Musk keeps saying it’s right around the corner.
“I predict that there will be millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously in the second half of next year,” Musk said on a call with Tesla investors last week.
Under Musk, Tesla has always leaned in the direction of sleek. That includes the sensors that Tesla uses for self-driving. Musk has insisted on using only cameras, which are tucked invisibly into the car’s body. He claims that this stripped-down approach will lower Tesla’s costs, while providing the same or better vision than human drivers have.
Musk has also always been in the spotlight, serving as the company’s pitchman. His super-active presence on social media reached a new height in 2022, when he bought Twitter — now renamed X — where he has subsequently become its most-followed user.
Waymo’s approach couldn’t be more different.
Waymo’s chief executives — there’s two of them — are little-known names.
One is Tekedra Mawakana, formerly a top lawyer for tech companies like AOL and Yahoo and Waymo’s former chief operations officer. The other is Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s former chief technology officer who arrived at the company from Google.
They write upbeat posts on X about Waymo’s expansions and partnerships, but unlike Musk, they don’t share their views on global or national politics.
Instead, the focus is on the service, with trust as a constant mantra. Waymo’s mission statement says the company seeks to be “the world’s most trusted driver.”
Then there’s the issue of sensors. No one in San Francisco would call a Waymo robotaxi sleek or mistake it for a regular passenger car — a fact that Waymo considers a selling point. “These aren’t normal vehicles,” Waymo says in a video.
Every Waymo in San Francisco is a retrofitted electric Jaguar I-PACE with a strange black top hat. It carries radar, cameras and, at the crest, a cylinder that looks like an old-fashioned revolving police light. It is a lidar sensor, which spins to measure the distance to surrounding objects, like cars, curbs and pedestrians.
Nubbins also protrude front and rear, above the headlights and below the taillights. Each is stuffed with more sensors. Altogether, a Waymo vehicle has four lidar sensors, six radars and 13 cameras.
By comparison, a Tesla senses its surrounding with just eight cameras. On a call with analysts in 2018, Musk called lidar “expensive, ugly and unnecessary.”
Promises vs. deliveries
In terms of trust, Waymo’s biggest departure from Tesla is what it has promised.
Waymo makes only vague predictions of future growth and announces its services when they are actually available. It shies from making bold and sweeping predictions — but when it speaks, it delivers.
“They’re scaling — and scaling effectively and responsibly,” said Mollie D’Agostino, a mobility policy specialist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. “They’re known in the industry for moving judiciously.”
A former Waymo CEO criticized Tesla for its ambitious promises after Musk said Waymo’s robotaxi “costs way more money.”
“They’ve failed utterly and completely at this for each of the 10 years they’ve been talking about it,” John Krafcik said in an interview with Business Insider when asked about Tesla’s self-driving efforts.
But Waymo’s success as a robotaxi leader is far from guaranteed. As recent events show, trust by customers and regulators can vaporize overnight.
Waymo has avoided drawing attention for accidents, but it took just one high-profile incident in San Francisco to kill off one of Waymo’s leading competitors.
Cruise, the robotaxi unit of General Motors, was expanding in San Francisco until two years ago, when a woman was knocked over by a hit-and-run driver. She then fell under a Cruise vehicle, which didn’t detect her presence and dragged her 20 feet until it parked at the curb.
Cruise then withheld data from state investigators looking into the matter. All told, Cruise paid a multimillion-dollar settlement with the victim, a $500,000 fine to settle a federal investigation and a fine of more than $100,000 to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates robotaxis. GM shut down its Cruise unit late last year.
Waymo’s recent safety record may be challenged by its expansion, as it moves into new cities and streets — any of which hold the potential for an accident that goes viral.
“We’ll have to see if they can perform at that growth rate,” said D’Agostino.
Even when there isn’t an accident, a robotaxi can be a magnet for controversy.
A year ago, during a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, a Waymo was attacked and set on fire, leaving a burn scar on the pavement. In response, Waymo issued a bland response, saying “we are collaborating closely with regional safety officials.”
That stands in contrast to Musk’s response to recent attacks on Tesla’s showrooms, charging stations and vehicles.
He called it “extreme domestic terrorism,” a position echoed by Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
San Francisco may be Tesla’s birthplace, but Musk’s affiliation with Trump isn’t doing Tesla any favors. In the most recent election, only 15 percent of voters in the city turned out for Trump.
That was reflected at the Tesla protest rally, where the names of Musk and Tesla were synonyms.
“I’m all for developing better technology, and if it’s better for the environment, great, but he’s such a scum,” said one protester named Greg, who didn’t offer his last name.
As Tesla’s profits plunge, Musk has told investors that he plans to decrease his time at DOGE. The question will be whether Tesla can rehabilitate its image.
“I only oppose Tesla to the extent that it hurts Musk,” Greg said.
