'Pet Destroyers': Musk Taunts Waymo While NHTSA Eyes Tesla

By TechPulse USA

Elon Musk has a new insult for Waymo: the company's driverless cars, he says, are "pet destroyers". He dropped it on a Saturday livestream, to laughs and clip-ready delight. Within 48 hours, his own company was facing its third federal action in five weeks.

Welcome to the robotaxi war. One chief executive throwing schoolyard taunts, regulators circling both fleets, and a San Francisco corner store still grieving a cat named KitKat. The technology is genuinely impressive. The behaviour of the people selling it is not.

What Musk Actually Said

During a livestream hosted by the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley on Saturday, October 11, Musk was walking through Tesla's robotaxi expansion plans — how the company tests software before entering new cities — when he took a swing at the market leader.

"Maybe what a lot of people don't know is that Waymos are like pet destroyers," said Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, in the relaxed cadence of a man doing a Saturday-afternoon Q&A with fans (Fox Business, Oct 13).

He was not finished. "Maybe Waymo has made some improvements on that front," Musk continued, "but they do run over a lot of pets, and we don't want to run over the pets."

Context matters. Musk was framing Tesla as the responsible actor. Before robotaxis enter a new city, he said, Tesla studies its streets for dangerous or confusing intersections: "Before we go to a new city, we want to make sure that there's not some intersection that's problematic or risky" — with particular attention, he added, to railroad crossings. "We want to be particularly careful with railroad crossings."

His logic was straightforward: confusing intersections make human drivers err, especially in unfamiliar areas, so robotaxis should navigate those spots safely or avoid them at first launch. Fox Business reported that it reached out to Waymo for comment on Musk's remarks. No response was reported.

The Gray Kitten Problem

Strip away the taunt and there is a genuine engineering claim underneath. Musk touted a robotaxi software update designed to spot animals in difficult nighttime conditions — the edge cases that keep autonomous-driving engineers up at night.

His example was vivid: a gray kitten against gray pavement, at night, in low visibility. Genuinely hard, and Musk claimed Tesla had cracked it. "So that we actually did solve that, by the way," he said — the change would be made, tested, then deployed.

What he did not give was a rollout date. He offered no data — no detection rates, no false-positive figures, no demonstration footage — on how reliably Tesla vehicles spot animals. For now the claim is exactly that: a claim, delivered on a fan livestream, without numbers attached. We checked what Tesla has published on animal-detection performance; so far, the public record is the livestream itself.

Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2022

Elon Musk at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2022. On a Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley livestream on October 11, 2026, the Tesla chief executive called Waymo's driverless cars "pet destroyers". — Photo: U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

KitKat: The Incident That Started It All

The reason the "pet destroyer" line lands — and the reason it is so cruel — is that a real dead cat stands behind it.

In October 2025, a Waymo driverless vehicle struck and killed KitKat, a cat beloved by customers of a San Francisco corner store (KTVU). The store's owner said a Waymo vehicle killed the cat; Waymo said the cat darted underneath as it pulled away after collecting passengers, expressed sympathy, and pledged a donation to an animal rights organisation in KitKat's honour.

That is the public record: one cat, one tragedy, sympathy and a donation. Musk stretches it into "they do run over a lot of pets" — a generalisation the facts do not obviously support. KitKat's death was real; the "pet destroyer" branding is marketing.

Still, the incident plainly wounded Waymo, and Musk — who never misses a weak spot — drove straight at it.

A Waymo driverless Jaguar I-PACE robotaxi in San Francisco. Waymo leads the autonomous ride-hailing market — and is the target of Musk's "pet destroyer" jibe. — Photo: Dllu via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

The Numbers Game: Nine Crashes vs One

The numbers, via Business Insider citing NHTSA data: between July 2025 and July 2026, Waymo reported at least nine animal crashes — six involving domestic animals. Tesla reported one, involving a supervised robotaxi.

Nine versus one sounds damning until the next sentence: Tesla's driverless fleet is far smaller — mostly Austin — while Waymo runs thousands of cars across several cities, and NHTSA cautions that reporting and operational differences make direct comparisons unreliable. More miles, more animals, more reports.

Musk's underlying point isn't nonsense — nighttime animal detection is genuinely hard. But "a lot of pets" from a fleet that's a rounding error by comparison is, shall we say, a choice.

NHTSA's School-Zone Probe

The irony Musk could not outrun: on Friday, October 9 — two days before the remarks — NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation opened file DP26010, a petition-evaluation on claims that Tesla robotaxis speed in active school zones (Electrek, Oct 12).

The petition reached NHTSA on September 23 and targets 2026 model-year robotaxis — Model Y and Cybercab — with the Automated Driving System engaged. Evidence: three social-media videos plus four incidents in NHTSA's own tally. No crashes, injuries or deaths reported. The question: can a car with nobody behind the wheel be trusted to slow down where children cross?

NHTSA puts the affected fleet at roughly 1,000 vehicles — the agency's estimate, and the first federal number ever for Tesla's robotaxi fleet (Tesla discloses nothing; Electrek suggests Texas DMV certification counts). Under 49 CFR Part 552, NHTSA has 120 days from receiving the petition to grant or deny it — around January 21, 2027. A grant means a formal defect investigation, which can end in a recall. We checked the docket: DP26010 is a petition-evaluation for now, not an investigation — but the federal pile-up is impossible to miss.

It is the third federal action against Tesla's driverless fleet in about five weeks, after an audit query and a Special Order over Cybercab certification. June 2025 Austin launch videos showed speeding cars; NHTSA contacted Tesla then, and opened another FSD probe that October over violations like running red lights. A week later Tesla shipped a "Mad Max" FSD profile that ignores speed limits — colossally tone-deaf. The distinction that matters: with FSD (Supervised), the owner picks the profile and owns the responsibility. A robotaxi has no owner behind the wheel; when the ADS speeds past a school, that decision is Tesla's.

Nobody's Hands Are Clean

Before Waymo's defenders celebrate: the other side is not clean either. Late last year, the Austin Independent School District reported Waymo vehicles illegally passing stopped school buses roughly 20 times. Waymo answered with a voluntary software recall in December 2025 — to its credit, but also an admission the problem was real.

Tesla has its own overdue homework. NHTSA ordered the company to prove, under oath, that a car with no pedals and no steering wheel — the Cybercab, in commercial service in Austin since September 3, 2026 — meets federal safety standards. Answers were due September 30. They have not been made public. The silence is deafening.

So here is our judgment. Musk's "pet destroyer" line is a schoolyard taunt from a chief executive whose own fleet is under federal scrutiny for speeding past schools. It is also, like most of Musk's best insults, aimed at something real: Waymo's animal-collision record is genuinely worse than it should be, and the KitKat episode revealed a corporate playbook — sympathy, donation, move on — that was shoddy in its lack of curiosity about what the car actually saw. Both companies are learning that autonomy will not be judged on a million uneventful miles. It will be judged on the one video that goes viral, the one school zone, the one cat. And the regulators are done taking their word for it.

What Comes Next

The calendar tells the story. Tesla's Cybercab runs commercially in Austin. Waymo keeps expanding — fully driverless taxis in Tokyo next year. NHTSA has until January 21, 2027, on the school-zone petition, and its oath-bound Cybercab answers are already overdue.

Musk says the gray-kitten detection update will be made, tested, then deployed — no date, no data. Waymo says nothing at all about the "pet destroyer" charge. The honest prediction: both will keep shipping software, keep expanding, and keep colliding — literally and figuratively — with the edge cases their marketing departments would rather not discuss.

The adults, in the end, are the ones with badges. And they are watching both fleets now.

Sources: Fox Business (Oct 13, 2026); Business Insider, citing NHTSA crash data; KTVU (KitKat reporting, Oct 2025); Electrek (Oct 12, 2026); NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation, file DP26010; 49 CFR Part 552.

By TechPulse USA

The TechPulse USA newsroom covers the global technology and AI industry — from Silicon Valley to London, Toronto and Sydney. Our reporters verify every fact against primary sources and reputable outlets before publication.

Search This Blog

TechPulse USA