Prominent Tesla Inc. TSLA investor Ross Gerber has highlighted significant challenges facing the electric vehicle maker’s Full Self-Driving system while praising competitor Waymo‘s autonomous driving technology.
What Happened: Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, pointed to Waymo’s growing presence in the robotaxi space.
“Waymo waymos everywhere. Driving flawlessly, with confidence. Robotaxi is here… and it’s called Waymo. Coming to your city soon,” he wrote on X on Thursday, referring to Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG subsidiary.
The investment manager’s comments come amid mounting concerns about Tesla’s hardware capabilities. Responding to Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, Gerber suggested that even Tesla’s Hardware 4 system won’t achieve full autonomy, citing “severe hardware limitations” compared to Waymo’s proven robotaxi technology.
These observations follow Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s recent acknowledgment that the company will need to upgrade Hardware 3 vehicles for FSD customers, a process Musk described as “painful and difficult.”
Why It Matters: The criticism extends beyond hardware concerns. Just a day after Musk celebrated Tesla’s achievement in “unsupervised” FSD operation, Gerber highlighted the practical limitations of the system’s vision-only approach. “My Tesla FSD doesn’t work when dust or ash gets in the cameras. Vision-only systems have some big limitations. Also, the sun shines into them wrong,” Gerber noted on X.
These developments come at a crucial time for Tesla’s autonomous driving program. The company faces an ongoing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into 2.6 million FSD-equipped vehicles, while Musk maintains that FSD will exceed human driving safety by the second quarter of 2025.
The debate intensified following Tesla’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, where Musk defended the company’s camera-only strategy, arguing that humans drive without “shooting lasers out of their eyes,” in contrast to competitors’ use of LiDAR technology.
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