Anthony Levandowski, who co-founded Google's self-driving car program, known today as Waymo, and later the off-road AV startup, joined me on the phone after Tesla's big robotaxi reveal to share his thoughts. And he is bullish on Elon Musk's vision for Tesla's and the world's future, but he's not without his, albeit small, reservations.

"I think the problem isn't the car without a steering wheel, it's making the software work," Levandowski told TechCrunch. "There's a lot of gap between driving around on a track at an amusement park and driving around in Los Angeles traffic. The optimism is there. The realism is what's coming next, and that will be where the hard part is."

An engineer who agreed with Musk's approach to self-driving, preferring not to use the "expensive sensors," had an even brighter outlook on the full self-driving capability. "Waymo already has fully operational driverless robotaxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix," he said. "I actually think it is a much more engineer-heavy and sensory-heavy approach, though.".

"But to scale that out to the masses, you need something that's affordable," he said. Levandowski said he was really looking for Tesla to announce breakthroughs in its FSD software, which it will need if it wants to get to unsupervised FSD by next year.

From the business model, Levandowski said he loved the thought of Cybercabs to be sold eventually.

You are taking the power back into the people's hands so that a small business owner could have, you know, a fleet of 10 cars or 20 cars that they run themselves as their business. It's a good model of the future where it's lots of mom and pops rather than one mega corp that does this.

He said, "Overall, the engineer said that he agrees with Tesla's vision of the future but does not expect it to come anytime soon, certainly not on the timelines Musk is setting.".

"If you can't even get your webcast to start on time, perhaps your forecast for 2026 is a little too optimistic," Levandowski quipped, a shot at Musk's publicized timeline for the Cybercab, in which production was expected to begin in 2026. (Also, apparently, the event started late because a guest had some kind of medical emergency, but not Musk's timelines.)

The Optimus robots, mingling with event guests on Thursday, Levandowski said he is bullish on.
 
"But it's a longer term bullish," he said. "It's not bullish this year. It's a bullish over time…Robots in general are going to be the biggest product. They're gonna be way bigger than Tesla cars, but they're much further away than full self-driving cars.

Wall Street investors didn't sound too positive about it. Trading opened with a drop of more than 7% in Tesla shares.