Tesla uberbulls often like to say that Tesla is the leader in self-driving because while it doesn’t have a commercially available autonomous ride-hailing service like Waymo, it doesn’t rely on geo-fencing and mapping like Waymo.
They argue that if Tesla wanted to do that it could, but it prefers to focus on an autonomous system that could drive anywhere, anytime, without mapping.
However, it is questionable that they could do it if they wanted to because they still haven’t done it on a project much simpler than Waymo’s operations in Pheonix and other cities: the tunnels under Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is The Boring Company’s first full-scale loop project currently in commercial use.
Elon Musk’s tunneling start-up completed the $50 million project in just over a year.
A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city. The Boring Company said that it was working with Tesla to use its self-driving system inside those tunnels, which would enables to get rid of the current drivers and lower the cost of operation.
However, 2 years and several more tunnels connected to the Loop later, The Boring Company is still using drivers in the tunnels.
Weren't Musk's hyperloop and tunnel projects always a scam? There's no point in getting these things to work if their only purpose was to discourage investment in public transit.
https://disconnect.blog/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-scam/
I'm not fully convinced that the hyperloop and Loop projects were always a scam. I think they were likely started out of frustration with existing systems, with a dash of over-optimism. The systems TBC have implemented so far do work, they've just been slower to scale than the early estimates.
As for discouraging investment in public transit, the Loop is a form of public transit, like a bus or subway. There's a detailed writeup here (apologies for the Reddit link) highlighting some of the potential advantages of the Loop over conventional trains in sparser cities. Many of these advantages have not (yet?) come to fruition, largely because TBC have been so slow to scale.
From Musk's ~~hagio~~biography, by Ashlee Vance: