Tesla’s robotaxi fleet will be powered by ‘plenty of teleoperation’

Tesla’s Austin robotaxi fleet will be powered by ‘plenty of teleoperation’ as it “can’t screw up”, according to a new report from Morgan Stanley after meeting with Tesla.

You won’t hear anything negative about Tesla from Morgan Stanley very often.

Morgan Stanley’s Tesla analyst, Adam Jonas, has often been described as a ‘Tesla cheerleader’ on Wall Street for his extremely rosy view of the company. He generally believes whatever Elon Musk claims and adds a slight delay to the CEO’s timeline.

Recently, Jonas met with Tesla with some clients and released a new note that he hinted to be based on what he learned from Tesla during the meeting.

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He claims that the planned “robotaxi” rollout in Austin next month is going to use “plenty of tele ops to ensure safety levels”:

Austin’s a ‘go’ but fleet size will be low. Think 10 to 20 cars. Public roads. Invite only. Plenty of tele ops to ensure safety levels (“we can’t screw up”). Still waiting for a date.

‘Tele ops’ stands for teleoperations, meaning that Tesla employees will be able to remotely access Tesla’s vehicles and operate them in some capacity.

Last year, Electrek reported that Tesla started hiring for this teleoperation team before the Robotaxi launch in Austin.

We have been extensively reporting on how much Tesla’s planned robotaxi fleet in Austin diverges from its previously disclosed plans of deploying “unsupervised Full Self-Driving” in its consumer vehicles.

Tesla plans to deploy “10-20” Model Y vehicles to offer ride-hailling services in a geo-fenced area of Austin, Texas using a version of its ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’ (FSD), but instead of being supervised by a driver inside the vehicle, like the current product in consumer vehicles, Tesla is going to used employees to remotely supervise the vehicles.

The service is supposed to launch in June.

Electrek’s Take

I seriously don’t get why anyone could get excited about this. It is going to be a bit better than the current FSD, which has stalled for months as Tesla focuses on optimizing the system for Austin, but it will still basically be supervised – just remotely.

There’s a chance that it won’t even be remote as some believe Tesla will even fumble that timeline and use safety drivers, but I don’t know. I’m about 50/50 on that prediction right now.

Remote supervisors make more sense as Tesla can claim a little victory even though it would be less impressive than what Waymo has been doing for years.

The real goal that Tesla sold to consumers is that their privately owned vehicles would become self-driving without supervision and we are still so far from that. It’s clear that this project is mainly to distract them from that fact.