Self-driving taxi race upgraded! Tesla, Inc. (TSLA.US) enters a new phase of "no safety driver" Waymo quickly opens up a new front in Miami

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA.US) announced the launch of a truly autonomous taxi service in Austin, marking a key milestone for the car manufacturer after seven months of launching a service that required a safety driver in the front seat. At the same time, Waymo's autonomous taxi service has landed in Miami, with airport testing starting simultaneously. CEO Elon Musk on Thursday reposted a test video on social media platform X by a Tesla, Inc. artificial intelligence engineer, highlighting this progress. Last month, Musk had already announced that the company would conduct tests of vehicles without any passengers. Ashok Elluswami, the head of artificial intelligence at Tesla, Inc., revealed in another post that a "small number" of vehicles in the Siasun Robot & Automation taxi fleet of the company are already operating without safety drivers. He mentioned that the percentage of vehicles without safety monitors will gradually increase in the future. As Tesla, Inc. is facing a decline in car sales, Musk is increasingly emphasizing the company's layout in the field of artificial intelligence and its ambitions with Siasun Robot & Automation taxis. Although the passenger service without human safety backup is expected to boost market confidence in its autonomous driving system capabilities, data submitted by Tesla, Inc. to regulatory agencies show that a small fleet operated in the capital of Texas was involved in 8 traffic accidents in the last six months. After this announcement, Tesla, Inc.'s stock price rose by 4% on the day. At the same time, Uber Technologies, Inc. and Lyft saw their stock prices drop by over 3%, and then slightly recovered. Musk has predicted multiple times that Tesla, Inc. will achieve unsupervised passenger transportation by the end of 2025, but some of his predictions are significantly different from reality. In July of this year, he estimated that by the end of the year, half of the U.S. population will be able to experience Tesla, Inc.'s autonomous driving service. Currently, Austin is the only city where Tesla, Inc. provides Siasun Robot & Automation taxi services. Although the company launched taxi services in the San Francisco Bay Area last year, it has not yet applied for permission to conduct autonomous driving tests without safety drivers in California. Tesla, Inc. lags far behind Alphabet's Waymo in this field - the latter launched fully autonomous services in the Phoenix area as early as the end of 2018, and has now deployed thousands of fee-charging autonomous vehicles in Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Miami. At the same time, Alphabet's autonomous driving company Waymo announced that its autonomous taxi service will officially open to the public in Miami on Thursday. This marks the first stop in about twelve cities the company plans to expand to this year. In an official blog post on Thursday, Waymo stated that it will gradually invite paid passengers from a waiting list of nearly ten thousand people in the Miami area to experience the service. Initially, the operating range will cover an area of about 60 square miles, including several core neighborhoods such as Design District, Wynwood, Brickell, and Coral Gables. A company spokesperson revealed that Waymo plans to expand its services to Miami International Airport in the future, with testing currently underway. In December last year, the company began offering fully autonomous shuttle services for airport employees. The spokesperson did not disclose the specific number of test vehicles in Miami, only stating that fewer than 100 vehicles will be initially deployed. As of November last year, Waymo had deployed approximately 2500 autonomous vehicles in five cities, with over half of them concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Waymo plans to launch services in over ten cities this year with a diversified business model, including other areas of the U.S. and London. The company adopts a cooperative operating model, outsourcing high labor-intensive processes such as vehicle cleaning, charging, and maintenance. In Miami, the company will be supported by Moove, a company backed by Uber Technologies, Inc., to provide these operational services.