Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson has delivered sharp criticism of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, timing his comments with his company’s launch of driverless ride-hailing vehicles in two American cities.
Speaking at the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference on Wednesday, Levinson dismissed Tesla’s recent announcements about Unsupervised FSD deployment in 2025.
When questioned about whether regulatory or technological hurdles posed the bigger challenge for Tesla’s robotaxi plans, Levinson was direct in his assessment.
“The more fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works,” Levinson stated.
He emphasized the distinction between a driver assistance system that works “most of the time” and a truly autonomous system that’s reliable enough to operate without human oversight.
Levinson also expressed concerns about Tesla’s camera-based approach, suggesting it creates “a false sense of complacency” before potentially failing. “Our perspective is you really do need significantly more hardware than Tesla is putting in their vehicles to build a robotaxi that is not just as safe, but especially safer than a human,” he explained.
Elon Musk was quick to respond to these criticisms with a post on X:
If he hadn’t gotten bailed out by Amazon, his company would be dead already
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2024
For those interested in watching Levinson’s full interview, the Tesla FSD discussion begins around the 21-minute mark:
Tesla’s Autonomous Vehicle Strategy and Market Competition
Earlier this month, Tesla showcased its vision for autonomous transportation at the “We, Robot” event, unveiling the two-seater Cybercab platform. The company plans to begin mass production before 2027.
While Tesla currently offers FSD Supervised through subscription or purchase options, its complete robotaxi service remains in development.
The company has announced plans to roll out Unsupervised FSD to Model 3 and Model Y owners in California and Texas next year, followed by implementation in the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X.
The autonomous ride-hailing landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. Waymo has already launched driverless services in San Francisco and Los Angeles, while Zoox is preparing similar deployments in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Cruise, owned by General Motors, is working to restart its paid ride service following last October’s pedestrian accident, which led to legal challenges and organizational changes.
Tesla maintains that its approach offers superior scalability, citing its extensive real-world training data from current FSD users.
The company argues that its neural network, trained on actual driving footage rather than geofenced scenarios, is better equipped to handle unexpected situations compared to competitors’ systems.
