Nvidia is challenging Tesla’s robotaxi dreams — but Elon Musk isn’t worried yet.
The Tesla CEO said it would take years for the company’s rivals to match its self-driving tech, after Nvidia unveiled an alternative suite of tools it said would help automakers “fast-track” robotaxi deployments.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the tech, called Alpamayo, at the CES conference on Monday and said it would bring “reasoning” to autonomous vehicles.
Responding to questions on X about what Alpamayo means for Tesla, Musk said that even with Nvidia’s help, it would take “several years” for automakers to advance their self-driving systems from being functional to safer than a human driver. He added that it would take several more years for automakers to add cameras and AI computers to their cars at scale.
“So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer,” Musk wrote in the Tuesday X post.
In a separate post on Tuesday, the billionaire said that Tesla had a commanding lead in AI hardware, adding that despite Nvidia providing “helpful tools,” the auto industry was doing “very little” on its own.
Nvidia said its Alpamayo family of open-source AI models used reasoning techniques to navigate unique driving situations known as “long-tail” problems that don’t show up in robotaxi training data, enabling vehicles to act autonomously with “humanlike judgment.”
“What they will find is that it’s easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution,” wrote Musk in another X post, describing Alpamayo as “exactly what Tesla is doing.”
Nvidia also announced that Tesla rival Mercedes-Benz would be the first company to adopt its self-driving system, with the chip maker planning to launch it in the company’s CLA sedan in the US in the first quarter of 2026.
Mercedes said the new CLA would be able to drive autonomously from point to point but still require human supervision, making it similar to vehicles equipped with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system.
Tesla shares were down 4% on Tuesday following Nvidia’s Alpamayo announcement.
Musk has pinned Tesla’s future on robotaxis and FSD, saying the technology will help Tesla become the world’s most valuable company and reverse its declining sales.
It’s also a major part of Musk’s mammoth pay package, with hitting 10 million FSD subscriptions among the milestones Tesla needs to hit for Musk to unlock the full $1 trillion payout.
Competition from Nvidia could complicate that vision. The world’s most valuable company has ambitious plans to roll out its tech in robotaxi fleets deployed by partners by next year and license it to other automakers, potentially removing the need for them to build their own FSD competitors in-house.
