Elon Musk took a dig at his robotaxi rival Waymo, calling the vehicles “pet destroyers” and saying Tesla robotaxis have solved the problem of avoiding stray pets.
Musk criticized Waymo’s reports of collisions with animals during a live interview at an event hosted by Tesla owners in Silicon Valley on Saturday.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that Waymos is like a pet destroyer,” Musk said with a laugh. “Well, maybe Waymo has made some improvements here, but they do crush a lot of pets, and we don’t want to crush pets.”
Waymo has been criticized for animal collisions before, most notably an October 2025 run-in with a beloved grocery store cat near San Francisco. Video obtained by The New York Times shows the cat named KitKat dying after being run over by Waymo’s right rear tire.
This isn’t the first time Waymo has had a collision with an animal.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s standing order requires self-driving car companies such as Waymo to report qualifying crashes. NHTSA data shows that between July 2025 and July 2026, Waymo reported at least nine crashes involving animals, six of which Waymo vehicles were described as domestic animals.
A Waymo spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Tesla’s robo-taxi service also reported a collision involving an animal during the same time period, but that incident involved a regulated robo-taxi. Tesla also operates a smaller fleet, with most of its unsupervised operations concentrated in one city: Austin.
Musk said in a virtual interview that Tesla robotaxis will be able to detect roaming pets at night.
“The challenge we faced was really this: At night, in low visibility, there were gray kittens on the gray tarmac with tar cracks. It was like, ‘Can we please not run over the kittens,'” he said.
Musk added that Tesla would deploy the update, but he did not specify when.
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