The Smartest Way to Own Self-Driving
Contributed Opinion

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I just wrapped a two-week tour of the country, where I sat down with 40 founders building what comes next.

One moment keeps replaying in my head: a Tesla Inc. (TSLA:NASDAQ) ride out of the startup enclave Proto-Town, heading back into Austin.

Proto-Town sits about an hour outside the city. What made the drive remarkable is that my friend, occupying the driver's seat, never put a hand on the wheel.

The car covered 50 miles on its own — highway congestion, merges, coned-off construction zones, surface streets.

Barely a few minutes in, he pulled up the USA–Belgium match on his phone and started watching.

Watching soccer from behind the wheel is not something I'd endorse.

Still, that ride rearranged how I think about the autonomy race. And about which stock belongs in a portfolio.

Let me say up front: Waymo impresses me.

I've taken plenty of their rides. They feel like the future — unhurried, composed, remarkably safe.

Waymo now delivers over 500,000 fully driverless rides a week. Its fleet has covered north of 220 million miles with nobody at the controls. Nothing else on the road matches its safety numbers.

If the question were narrowly "whose robotaxi operation is best right now?" — Waymo takes it, no contest.

But I came to see that as the wrong framing. This isn't a contest between two robotaxi fleets.

It's a contest between a driverless cab you summon now and then, and a driverless car parked in your own garage.

Framed that way, the answer isn't close.

Americans put more than 3 trillion miles on vehicles annually. Cabs and ride-hailing represent something like 1% to 2% of that. The overwhelming majority of driving happens in cars people own.

Dropping kids off at school. Getting to work. The grocery run. Sunday at your parents'. The long weekend drive.

Waymo can own taxis and ride-hailing. Tesla is going after all of it.

You can walk into a Tesla store today and use FSD (full self-driving) on the exact routes you already drive. Buying a Waymo isn't an option. And if you don't happen to live inside one of its sanctioned zones, riding in one may not be either.

$75,000.

That's Waymo's outlay for each of its latest vehicles. Earlier generations ran $150,000 apiece. Every city needs them by the thousand.

And the purchase price is only the entry fee. Waymo also carries insurance, charging, cleaning, repairs, and parking. Doubling a city fleet means buying and running twice the number of expensive cars.

Tesla carries none of that.

Its buyers purchase the vehicle and maintain it themselves. Then Tesla bills them monthly for the FSD software on top.

Waymo spends money to put a car on the road. Tesla collects money to put a car on the road.

Opening a new Waymo market means…

Mapping and testing the streets. Drawing an approved service boundary. Positioning vehicles. Standing up, charging, and service depots. Negotiating with local officials. The end product is excellent, but growth arrives city by city.

Which is why, nearly twenty years after the program began, Waymos still can't handle most freeways.

Tesla expands at the pace of software.

Its cars already operate on every kind of road in the country. Austin's dusty backroads gave it no trouble.

Tesla may eventually demonstrate that FSD is safe with nobody supervising. Should that happen, it could turn the capability on across the entire country with a single over-the-air update.

From where I sat, Tesla's FSD already drives like a pro.

Ultimately, self-driving is an AI problem.

These systems get better by ingesting staggering volumes of driving data.

They have to encounter routine situations millions of times over, and edge cases often enough to learn the right response. Construction detours. Baffling intersections. Tailgaters. Cyclists. Rough weather. Faded lane markings. All of it is training material.

Here, Tesla holds a real edge.

Its owners have accumulated something like 11.9 billion miles on supervised FSD. Waymo's driverless total sits at roughly 220 million.

The two aren't interchangeable. Tesla still has a person in the seat prepared to take over. Waymo's miles happen with nobody there at all — a stronger proof of genuine autonomy.

But Tesla's pile is more than 50 times larger. And it comes from a far wider spread of conditions, rather than from pre-vetted operating zones.

If a flawless robot driver is achievable, Tesla is the most likely one to build it.

Close to 40,000 Americans are killed on the roads annually.

Waymo and Tesla are both aiming at that figure. Both will save enormous numbers of lives. It's more useful to treat autonomous vehicles as a "vaccine" against something lethal than as one more gadget.

Part of me wants both to succeed enormously. My children may never bother with a license. That suits me fine.

But we're here as investors. And Tesla holds the better product, the bigger addressable market, and a model built to scale far faster.

That makes it the self-driving stock to buy.

Congratulations to Disruption Investor subscribers sitting on a 30% gain in Tesla since it entered the portfolio. Our work points to it doubling from here over the next several years.

Plenty of people I met in Austin's "Elon universe" are certain that Tesla and SpaceX (SPCX:NASDAQ) — both now trading publicly — will combine within a year or two.

Professional investors love the idea they alone spotted, the one that makes them sound clever.

But if the goal is actually making money, and it is for me, maybe the best call is also the least sophisticated-sounding one: Long Elon Inc.