Another bizarre incident with a Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, Texas, highlights the company's difficulties in rolling out the service.
What's happening?
YouTuber and Tesla superfan Ellie in Space (@ellieinspace) documented her first trip in the ride-hailing electric vehicle June 27 — but it didn't go as planned, as Futurism reported.
Ellie and another passenger, who seemed like a Tesla employee, were forced out of the EV after a call from a customer support representative. Apparently, the Model Y was not fit to operate in approaching bad weather. She also noted the taxi had "randomly" entered a parking lot on the trek.
"I don't want to just be a Tesla rah-rah cheerleader," Ellie said. "It is very cool. However, this is a limitation currently how it is. You shouldn't have to terminate the service cuz it's about to rain."
Strangely, the duo was able to hail another Robotaxi — the same vehicle they had been ushered out of, though they returned to their departure point and did not continue on to their destination.
Why is this important?
As Futurism noted, Tesla's launch of its Robotaxis has "led to plenty of chaos, including violently jerking steering wheels, unexpected braking around cop cars, and a dangerous drop-off in the middle of a four-way intersection."
Despite Ellie and the ostensible employee's upbeat and positive reviews, the nearly 13-minute video provides more moments of worry than ease.
Ellie, for example, said her personal experience with Tesla's Full Self-Driving software made her more comfortable with the Robotaxi service than she is in her own Tesla, though there's not much, if any, difference in the technology, leading viewers to wonder why she would be more trusting of the untested tech and about her motivations for saying she was.
Moreover, after the apparent employee early in the video listed the accoutrements of the ride, he dubiously insisted that the "safety observer" in the passenger seat was unable to control the vehicle without touching its display screen. As other early Robotaxi riders have documented, the observer's right hand was glued to the door handle, and his thumb was seemingly on a button that, rumor has it, can immediately shut down the automobile.
The bumpy start matches the EV pioneer's situation, with slumping sales and falling stock making for an inauspicious outlook. Futurism pointed out that Tesla in early July delivered 60,000 fewer vehicles from April to June than it had over the same period last year, marking the biggest falloff in its history.
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Definitely 👍 What's being done about Tesla's robotaxi service?
Because of this, CEO Elon Musk has leaned into the Robotaxi service as the future of the company. And while autonomous taxis that don't produce pollution seem like an ideal way to save people money and reduce the production of heat-trapping gases that are unsustainably warming the planet, Tesla has a long way to go.
Waymo is far ahead in the space, offering a perhaps safer — though still flawed — service that has become the standard, with availability in the Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Atlanta areas.
To get there, Tesla will have to overcome regulatory hurdles as well as inferior technology, as its FSD and other driver-assist software feature only cameras, while Waymo uses lidar and radar in addition to cameras. As another YouTuber showed, this creates a gap in how the driverless vehicles react to safety hazards, including children getting off buses and a Wile E. Coyote-style wall.
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