Waymo vs Tesla: The battle over autonomous driving standards

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Yaroslav Dmytrenko

08.02.2026

Waymo vs Tesla: The battle over autonomous driving standards — Waymo and Tesla clash over autonomous driving safety standards

The debate between developers of autonomous driving technology and robotaxi services is increasingly focused on whether expensive multi-sensor systems or cheaper camera-only approaches will gain approval from regulators and passengers in 2026.

Highlights

The U.S. Congress is considering the creation of unified federal safety rules for self-driving vehicles, which are becoming more common in major cities.
Standards have become the central issue, with Alphabet subsidiary Waymo rejecting Tesla’s camera-only approach. Waymo argues that robotaxis must meet higher safety standards than human drivers.
Tesla relies on fewer than 10 cameras, while Waymo deploys 29 cameras, five lidars, and six radars per vehicle. Regulators must determine whether these fundamentally different approaches meet consistent safety requirements.

As U.S. lawmakers move forward with efforts to establish nationwide safety rules for autonomous vehicles and robotaxis, disagreements between the leading developers—Alphabet’s Waymo and Tesla—have become increasingly public.

Currently, roughly half of U.S. states have their own regulations governing autonomous rides, while the rest have none at all.

Against this backdrop, Shrikant Thirumalai, Waymo’s vice president of onboard software, has made clear his disagreement with Tesla’s philosophy that autonomous vehicles should operate like human drivers and therefore rely primarily on cameras, just as humans rely on their eyes.

Tesla’s systems use fewer than 10 cameras, while Waymo vehicles are equipped with 29 cameras, five lidars, and six radars. In an interview with Business Insider, Thirumalai said safety standards should be higher than those of human driving.

Around 2,500 Waymo vehicles are currently operating in U.S. cities. The next generation, expected by the end of 2026, will include 13 cameras, four lidars, and six radars.

The core challenge remains the tradeoff between cost and safety. More sensors increase costs and make scaling to millions of vehicles more difficult, while fewer sensors may raise safety concerns that regulators and passengers are unwilling to accept.

Thirumalai said Waymo first defines the required safety level and then works to reduce sensor costs and improve software. He expects the system to evolve over the next three to five years but said the company will not abandon lidar simply because it is expensive.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, speaking at the ScaledML conference on January 29, framed autonomous driving primarily as an AI problem rather than a sensor problem. His argument is that since humans navigate using vision, autonomous vehicles should be able to rely on cameras as well.

At the same time, videos continue to circulate online showing autonomous vehicles making mistakes in school zones, near emergency vehicles, in poor weather, and during routine trips.

Accidents are inevitable — the question is when and how many

Last week, executives from Tesla and Waymo appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, presenting arguments that their vehicles are safer than human drivers despite recent incidents.

Senators expressed interest in reducing traffic accidents through autonomous systems but also raised concerns about recent crashes involving self-driving vehicles.

“Fully autonomous vehicles have the potential to reduce crashes, but we see risks in allowing companies to beta test on our roads without adequate safeguards,” said committee member Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington.

Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced an investigation into Waymo robotaxis that passed stopped school buses and failed to yield after a series of incidents in Austin, Texas—actions Senator Ted Cruz described as “clearly unacceptable.”

Earlier this month in Santa Monica, California, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near her elementary school. The child, who according to the company ran out from behind another car, suffered minor injuries.

Waymo told senators that its vehicles are involved in serious crashes ten times less frequently than human-driven cars over the same distance. The data comes from an independent audit covering200 million miles of autonomous driving.

Tesla, meanwhile, said its vehicles using Full Self-Driving average 5.1 million miles between major crashes, compared with a national average of 699,000 miles for human drivers.

However, Tesla has recently begun deploying its robotaxi service in Austin, and according to a report based on NHTSA data analysis, the company’s vehicles may have recorded higher crash rates than human drivers last year.

As a result, the safety debate surrounding the autonomous systems of both companies remains unresolved. Nevertheless, during the hearings both Tesla and Waymo urged lawmakers to accelerate the creation of federal regulations.

As we wrote, Tesla stock falls 3.5% amid UK sales slump

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