Elon Musks Tesla eyes transportation domination as Cybercab expansion heats up competition with Waymo

Elon Musk’s Tesla is gearing up to expand its gold-colored Cybercab robotaxi service beyond Austin, Tex., next month, with an exec saying the automaker is planning transportation “domination.”The electric car giant plans to deploy its futuristic two-seaters in Dallas in November and begin selling Cybercabs to outside fleet operators by the end of the year, executives said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call this week.The expansion could intensify Tesla’s rivalry with Alphabet-owned Waymo, which has a commanding lead in the emerging robotaxi business with more than 4,000 self-driving vehicles deployed across more than a dozen US cities.Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja suggested the company has even bigger ambitions.“We’re starting with getting people from one place to the other, but we want to basically own transportation of any kind on Earth,” Taneja told analysts Wednesday.But Musk faces significant hurdles as Tesla attempts to turn its robotaxi business into a major source of revenue.The Cybercab, which began carrying paying passengers in September, currently operates only in limited areas of Texas’s home city.The company’s broader robotaxi network, which also uses Model Y SUVs, serves six metropolitan areas across Texas and Florida, including Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa.Waymo, meanwhile, has expanded its commercial service to 15 US markets, including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix and Las Vegas.The Google sister company surpassed 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week earlier this year, according to Alphabet, while Tesla has yet to disclose how many paid robotaxi trips it provides.Waymo’s lead is even more pronounced when measured by driverless miles.Waymo reported logging 271.3 million miles without a human driver through June, compared with roughly 3.1 million unsupervised miles through Oct.18 for Tesla, according to figures in the companies’ safety reports.Although the numbers c...