For years, the Tesla versus Waymo debate has been framed like a referendum on ideology. Tesla is supposed to be the scrappy scale play: millions of cars, camera-only, end-to-end neural networks, and a system that is not “boxed in” by geofences. Waymo, by contrast, is often portrayed as the cautious boutique: expensive sensors, mapped cities, limited domains, and a business that looks like a science project.

That framing is comforting because it turns autonomy into a future-tense argument. In 2026, it is getting harder to keep it in the future tense. Waymo is already selling the thing Tesla is still selling as a promise: rides where nobody is responsible for driving, because nobody is driving. Tesla’s most common “FSD advantage” arguments keep circling around scale, simplicity, and generality. But when you look at what autonomy actually is, and what it takes to scale it safely, those arguments start collapsing one by one.