- Tesla Robotaxi is officially live in Austin and select content creators and influencers were allowed to experience it.
- The cars drive just like any Tesla with Full Self-Driving, but they have a safety a safety monitor onboard, as well as chase cars.
- The Robotaxi program is currently limited to a part of Austin, Texas, with plans to expand into major cities in California.
Driverless Teslas officially ferried their first passengers in Austin this past Sunday. The experience wasn’t as “unsupervised” as CEO Elon Musk promised, since all cars have a safety co-driver on board. But the experience seems to have gone smoothly enough—with a few incidents that leave room for improvement.
YouTubers uploaded their first rides in a driverless Tesla on public roads, and it looked a lot like Full Self-Driving, but with nobody behind the wheel. The safety monitor sat in the front passenger seat, presumably with their finger on the kill switch, ready to stop the ride at any time.
This wasn’t a true public test, though. Only select (usually overtly pro-Tesla) content creators and influencers were selected to take part in the carefully choreographed initial trial. Throughout the 10 or so different videos that I watched, the cars seemed to navigate Austin’s streets and traffic well enough.
Most of the videos that I watched were the full, uncut ride, which helped lend credibility, and some were live streams. Many early videos seem as good as anything I’ve witnessed from Waymo, with cars driving quite assertively, confidently taking turns, driving smoothly, and generally leaving a very good impression with their users.
However, Fortune reported some issues. One was the long wait times and an initial two-hour delay for the service to begin. In another instance, a Model Y attempted to turn left before then swerving back onto its previous path—putting it briefly into an oncoming lane, the publication reported. See the video below for details.
In another example, a Robotaxi was caught speeding. In a video from Tesla investor and influencer Sawyer Meritt, the car can be seen going at 40 mph in a 30 mph zone, and there are a couple of other instances when Robotaxis are seen going a few miles per hour over the limit.
The current fleet is limited to around 20 vehicles, and given the whole safety monitor and chase car situation, it’s clear Tesla doesn’t quite have the confidence to let these cars roam free yet. The way the system currently works (with the double backup) may be needed to meet regulators’ demands. But this is temporary, as Tesla hopes to eventually have a huge fleet of Cybercabs that won’t have any physical controls that would allow occupants to steer or stop the car.
Musk set a very ambitious target for the Robotaxi program: to have “hundreds of thousands, if not a million Teslas doing self-driving” by the end of 2026. This figure doesn’t just refer to purpose-built self-driving taxis, though. It likely also includes owners who would have their car become an autonomous robotaxi through an app that promises to combine Uber and Airbnb, essentially allowing Tesla owners to get their cars to earn money for them. Musk has floated this idea around for a while, but
The Tesla boss would like to see a standardized nationwide set of rules and regulations for self-driving cars to eventually make it possible to drive passengers autonomously over state lines. The current flat fee of $4.20 will likely change by then to something more similar to the dynamic demand- and distance-based fee system used by ride-hailing apps like Uber or Lyft.
There is still room for improvement in the system, and it’s unclear if it will reach its full potential within the next 18 months. It’s also unclear when and if FSD (and by extension the Robotaxi program) will be allowed on European roads.
The absence of radar or other types of sensors still doesn’t seem like a wise decision to me, as it may not sit well with regulators who may want some redundancy in the way the car ‘sees’ the road. Tesla is still subject to
You can currently sign up for a Robotaxi account even if you’re not in Austin, Texas, and Tesla will send you a notification when it becomes available in your area. Tesla has previously revealed that it’s looking to bring the service to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio in the future, but it didn’t provide a definite time frame for this expansion. It also didn’t mention a plan to offer the service in New York anytime soon, so Waymo could be the first to have driverless cars in the Big Apple.