Elon Musk branded Waymo driverless cars “pet destroyers” for running over animals, citing the rival’s crash tally while Tesla pushes its own robotaxi safety tech.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk used a livestreamed interview with Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley to take direct aim at Waymo’s animal-collision record, arguing the Alphabet-backed robotaxi service has a pattern of hitting pets that Tesla does not want to repeat.
Daily Mail reported that Musk framed the jab as both a warning and a competitive pitch as the two companies push autonomous taxi fleets into more cities.
“Maybe what a lot of people don't know is that Waymos are like pet destroyers,” Musk said.
"Maybe Waymo has made some improvements on that front, but they do run over a lot of pets, and we don't want to run over the pets."
The comments land against a documented stretch of Waymo animal strikes in San Francisco and federal crash figures that put numbers behind the claim.
On October 27, 2025, a Waymo robotaxi struck KitKat, a well-known cat who had become a fixture at Randa’s Market in San Francisco’s Mission District. Locals called the cat the “mayor of 16th Street.” KitKat died later that night.
Waymo initially said the cat darted underneath the vehicle as it pulled away after stopping to pick up passengers. In December, The New York Times published surveillance footage of the moments before the strike. The footage showed a bystander crouching near the front of the car, trying to coax KitKat away from a tire. The cat moved further underneath. The Waymo then pulled away and ran him over.
Weeks later, around 8 p.m. on November 30, 2025, another Waymo hit a small unleashed dog near the intersection of Scott and Eddy streets in San Francisco’s Western Addition. Waymo confirmed its vehicle made contact with the dog while the animal was in the roadway. KRON4 reported the dog suffered severe pelvic trauma and was later put down by its family.
Those two cases were not isolated in the federal data. Between July 2025 and July 2026, Waymo reported at least nine crashes involving animals to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company described six of them as involving domestic animals.
Tesla reported one animal collision in the same NHTSA window. That incident involved a supervised robotaxi, not an unsupervised one. Direct scorekeeping is messy. Tesla ran a smaller fleet, and most of its unsupervised robotaxi operations have been concentrated in Austin rather than dense San Francisco streets.
Still, Musk treated the gap as a product problem Tesla intends to close before wider rollout. The same competitive pressure that has lifted Tesla shares on strong deliveries also puts a premium on proving the cars can handle edge cases that kill pets.
Musk described the detection challenge in blunt terms.
"We have these challenges of literally like: gray kittens on a gray tarmac with tar seams at night in low visibility."
“And it's like, ‘Can we not run over the kittens,’ type of thing,” he added. He said Tesla had solved the problem and would deploy an update, though he gave no timeline and no performance data.
Musk tied the animal-detection work to a broader caution about entering new markets. Tesla, he said, checks for risky intersections before launching in a fresh city and is “particularly careful with railroad crossings.”
"Before we go to a new city, we want to make sure that there's not some intersection that's problematic or risky."
“We want to be particularly careful with railroad crossings,” Musk said. The pitch is straightforward: do not scale unsupervised Cybercab service until the cars can handle the ugly cases, low light, small animals, rail crossings, not just sunny demo routes.
That caution sits beside other regulatory scrutiny of Tesla’s robotaxi path, including a period when federal regulators probed Cybercab certification and the stock took a hit. Safety questions do not stay in the lab. They show up in crash reports, pet obituaries, and investor reaction.
Waymo remains the more established robotaxi presence in San Francisco. Tesla is still building out. Musk’s “pet destroyers” line is marketing with a body count attached. It puts Waymo’s NHTSA animal-crash total and the KitKat and dog cases in the same frame as Tesla’s claim that it will not accept the same outcome.
Musk has made a habit of answering pressure in public, whether the fight is over robotaxis or the short sellers who have piled billions against SpaceX. The pattern is the same: name the failure, claim a fix, and dare rivals and markets to keep up.
For pet owners in the cities where these fleets already roll, the abstract debate over autonomy is secondary. A cat known as the mayor of 16th Street is dead. A family had to put down a dog after pelvic trauma from a robotaxi strike. Federal filings show more animal crashes behind those two.
Musk’s business reach keeps widening into media and industrial bets alike, including talk of him as a possible equity partner in a massive studio combination that has drawn David Ellison’s interest in a Paramount-Warner deal. None of that changes the street-level test for robotaxis. If the cars cannot see a gray kitten on gray pavement at night, the technology is not ready for unsupervised scale.
Real-world safety beats press-release autonomy. Companies that treat neighborhood pets as acceptable collateral will hear about it, from owners, from regulators, and from competitors willing to say it out loud.