Tesla Robotaxi launch is a dangerous game of smoke and mirrors
Tesla’s upcoming Robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, is increasingly looking like a game of smoke and mirrors, and a dangerous one at that.
CEO Elon Musk claims Tesla is being “paranoid with safety”, but it is taking risks for the purpose of optics.
It’s all about optics
Musk has been wrong about self-driving for years. His track record is marked by missed deadlines and broken promises.
He said:
“Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we’ll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let’s say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.”
That was in 2016, and therefore, he claimed it would happen by the end of 2017. Today, in 2025, Tesla is still not capable of doing that.
Musk has claimed that Tesla would achieve unsupervised self-driving every year for the last decade. It has become a running gag, with many YouTube videos featuring his predictions and a Wikipedia page tracking his missed deadlines.
Famously, the predictions are about Tesla achieving self-driving “by the end of the year” or “next year.”
This time, Musk has set a clear deadline of “June” for Tesla to launch its robotaxi service.
With Waymo pulling ahead in the autonomous driving race, now operating in four cities, providing over 200,000 paid rides per week, and soon expanding with 2,000 more vehicles, Musk needs a win to maintain the illusion he has been pushing for a while: that Tesla is the leader in autonomous driving.
He recently claimed about Tesla’s self-driving technology:
No one is even close. There’s really not a close second. We felt like it was a bit of an iPhone moment — you either get it or you don’t, and there’s a massive gap.
This is becoming increasingly difficult to claim amid Waymo’s expansion. Still, Musk believes that the robotaxi launch in Austin will help maintain the illusion, even though Waymo has already been operating like Tesla’s plans in Austin for years in other cities and for months in Austin itself.
Moving of the Goal Post
We have often described what Tesla is doing in Austin with its planned “robotaxi” launch as a moving of the goalpost.
For years, Tesla has promised unsupervised self-driving in all its vehicles built since 2016. Musk explicitly said that customers who bought Tesla’s Full Self-Driving package would be able to “go to sleep” at the wheel of their vehicles and wake up in another city.
Now, Musk is claiming that Tesla has “solved” self-driving with its “robotaxi” launch, but it is vastly different from prior promises.
Tesla plans to operate its own small internal fleet of vehicles with dedicated software optimized for a geo-fenced area of Austin and supported by “plenty of teleoperation.” This is a night-and-day difference compared to deploying unsupervised self-driving in customer vehicles, as promised since 2016.
Musk himself is on record saying, “If you need a geofence area, you don’t have real self-driving.”
Now, Musk is on record saying that Tesla will only launch the service in a limited area in Austin and even avoid certain intersections that Tesla is not sure it can handle:
We will geo‑fence it. It’s not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident it’s going to do well with that intersection. Or it will just take a route around that intersection.
In addition to geofencing, Tesla is also utilizing teleoperation to control vehicles with human operators remotely.
We reported last year when Tesla started building a “teleoperation team.”
Despite Tesla originally planning to launch the robotaxi service on June 12, and now “tentatively” on June 22, the automaker posted a new job listing days ago for engineers to help build a low-latency teleoperation system to operate its “self-driving” cars and robots.
The use of geofencing and teleoperation results in Tesla having the same limitations as Waymo, which Musk claimed means it’s “not real self-driving and not scalable to the customer fleet as promised by Tesla for years.
‘Paranoid’ about Safety
Musk claims that Tesla is being “super paranoid” about safety, but you have to take his word for it.
We have pointed it out before, but it’s worth repeating: Waymo tested its self-driving vehicles in Austin for six months with safety drivers and then for another six months without safety drivers before launching its autonomous ride-hailing service in the city.
As for Tesla, it tested its vehicles with safety drivers throughout Austin for a few months. Then, Musk announced in late May, only weeks before the planned launch, that it had started testing without safety drivers.
Despite many people being on the lookout for these driverless Tesla Robotaxis, they were only spotted for the first time last week.
Since then, only two confirmed Tesla vehicles without drivers have been spotted testing.
Furthermore, several of those vehicles were spotted with Tesla employees in the front passenger seat. While Musk claims that there are “no safety driver”, these “passengers” pay attention at all times and have access to a kill switch to stop the vehicle.
They virtually operate like “safety drivers”, but they are on the passenger seat rather than the driver’s seat.
Tesla is currently still in the “testing” phase based on the listing with the state regulators, which also mentions “no” safety drivers:
To go back to the “optics” for a second, Tesla’s head of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, has shared this conveniently cropped image of Tesla’s “robotaxis” being tested in Austin:
The image crops out the passenger seat of the car in front, which would show a Tesla employee, and the driver’s seat of the trailing car, which would show a driver, as spotted in Austin over the last week.
There’s also no way to know precisely at what rates these safety passengers and remote operators are intervening on the self-driving vehicles.
Tesla has never released any intervention or disengagement data about its self-driving and ADAS programs despite using “miles between disengagements” as a metric to track improvements and Musk claiming for years that self-driving is a “solved problem” for Tesla.
As we have previously reported, the best available data comes from a crowdsourced effort. Musk has previously shared and misrepresented the dataset in a positive light.
Currently, the data for the combined two most recent updates (v13.2.8-9) on Tesla’s latest hardware (HW4), which is reportedly the same hardware used in Tesla’s “robotaxis” in Austin, currently sits at 444 miles between critical disengagements:
That would imply a high risk of an accident every 444 miles without a driver paying attention and ready to take control at all times.
Tesla is also currently actively fighting in court against organizations trying to access its self-driving crash data.
There are currently efforts to raise concerns about Tesla’s “robotaxi” deployment in Austin.
The Dawn Project attempted to convey the potential danger of Tesla’s upcoming robotaxi fleet by demonstrating how Tesla vehicles fail to stop for school buses with their stop signs activated and can potentially run over children on the latest public Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) v13.2.9:
Musk has repeatedly highlighted that the vehicles used for the robotaxi service in Austin are the same that it currently delivers to customers, like this one used in this test.
However, they use a new, custom software optimized for Austin, with supposedly more parameters, allowing for greater performance. Still, there is no way to verify this, as Tesla has not released any data.
Electrek’s Take
I can’t lie. I’m getting extremely concerned about this. I don’t think that we can trust Musk or Tesla in their current state to launch this safely.
As I previously stated, I think Tesla’s FSD would be an incredible product if it were sold as a regular ADAS system, rather than something called “Full Self-Driving,” with the promise that it would eventually become unsupervised.
Tesla wouldn’t face a significant liability for not being able to fulfill its promises to customers, as it has already confirmed for HW3 owners. Additionally, safety would be improved, as drivers wouldn’t become so complacent with the technology.
Speaking of those failed promises, they are also what’s driving Tesla to push for this launch in Austin.
As Waymo’s former long-time CEO John Krafcik said about Tesla’s effort: “There are many ways to fake a robotaxi service.”
Musk badly needs a win with self-driving, and he saw an opportunity to get one by getting his gullible fanbase of Tesla shareholders excited about a glimpse at its long-promised future full of “Tesla robotaxis.”
As he previously stated, he knows full well that the way Tesla is doing this is not more scalable than Waymo even if the hardware cost per vehicle is lower. The hardware cost is negligible compared to teleoperation, development, insurance, and other expenses.
Even with all the smoke and mirrors involved with this project, it’s becoming clear that Tesla is not even ready for it.
Now, the question is whether Musk lets the June deadline slip and takes another ‘L’ on self-driving, or if he pushes for Tesla to launch the potentially dangerous service with lots of limitations.
With the federal government in complete shambles and the Texas government being too close to Musk and Tesla, I wouldn’t count on the regulators to act here. Although they probably should.
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Tesla is gearing up to start selling its upcoming Tesla Semi electric truck in Europe with a new hire to develop the market.
Tesla Semi is finally about to go into volume production in the US after being unveiled almost a decade ago.
The vehicle was unveiled in 2017 and was initially scheduled to enter production in 2019; however, the automaker delayed the program on several occasions.
Tesla unveiled a “production version” in 2022, but it was only produced in small batches. The Class 8 electric truck remains a rare sight in the US, with only a few dozen units in the hands of a handful of customers and a few more in Tesla’s internal fleet.
In January 2023, Tesla announced an expansion of Gigafactory Nevada to build the Tesla Semi in volume.
However, that plan was also changed and delayed. Tesla ultimately built a separate factory adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada, and production was delayed until 2025.
Earlier this year, Tesla completed the building and started working on the production lines. The automaker said that Tesla Semi production was expected to begin in late 2025 and ramp up to a capacity of 50,000 trucks per year.
Now, we learn that Tesla is starting to build an organization to sell the Tesla Semi in Europe.
Electrek found that Tesla hired a new leader to head business development for Tesla Semi in Europe.
Usuf Schermo announced on his LinkedIn last week that he joined Tesla as “Head of Business Development EMEA for Tesla Semi.”
Schermo, who holds a master in economic engineering, energy and ressources management from TU Berlin, has some experience with commercial electric vehicles.
He was the head of sales in Germany for Volta Trucks from 2022 to 2024. The company made the Volta One, a 16-tonne electric truck aimed at city deliveries.
Volta went bankrupted in 2023, but it got back in business with a restructuring in 2024, which didn’t last long as they were insolvent as of last month.
For the last year, Schermo has been leading sales for EVUM aCar, a German startup building a small commercial vehicle.
Now, he will develop the market for Tesla’s class 8 electric truck.
The European electric commercial truck market is much developed in the US with already some significant competition from Volvo with the Volvo FH Electric, Mercedes-Benz with the eActros 600, MAN with the eTGX, and several others.
The market is still young, but Volvo is already emerging as a leader with an estimated more than 3,000 electric trucks in operations in Europe.
With production only starting in the US toward the end of the year, Tesla is not likely to have an homologated version of the Tesla Semi in Europe until later in 2026.
Tesla has already announced plans to build the Tesla Semi in Europe at Gigafactory Berlin.
The automaker currently only produces the Model Y at the German factory and its sales are crashing across Europe.
Electrek’s Take
I keep saying to Tesla fans that hate me: I track both Tesla hires and departures. I try to report on both, but the former are much more scarce than the latter these days.
This is one of the few significant hires of the last years at Tesla and say “significant” because it shows Tesla is preparing to sell the Tesla Semi in Europe because this is clearly not an executive level role.
Over the last year and since the great purge of talent in April 2024, Tesla has almost been exclusive promoting from within at higher director and VP levels rather than hire from outside.
As for the Tesla Semi in Europe, it could work. Like I said, there’s already a lot of competition, but Tesla Semi is expected to have a longer range than everything else, which should attract buyers.
However, as we recently reported, it is expected to be much more expensive than what Tesla previously announced.
It could particularly useful for Gigafactory Berlin, which is at a real risk right now with Tesla’s sales crashing in Europe. Producing a new vehicle program there, and a commercial one that rely less on consumer perception, could help increase factory utilization.
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Environment
Shipping groups are starting to shy away from the Strait of Hormuz as Israel-Iran conflict rages on
An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps speed boat sailing along the Persian Gulf during the IRGC marine parade to commemorate Persian Gulf National Day, near the Bushehr nuclear power plant in the seaport city of Bushehr, in the south of Iran, on April 29, 2024.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Some shipowners are opting to steer clear of the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, according to the world’s largest shipping association, reflecting a growing sense of industry unease as the Israel-Iran conflict rages on.
Israel’s surprise attack on Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure on Friday has been followed by four days of escalating warfare between the regional foes.
That has prompted shipowners to exercise an extra degree of caution in both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, a critical gateway to the world’s oil industry — and a vital entry point for container ships calling at Dubai’s massive Jebel Ali Port.
Jakob Larsen, head of security at Bimco, which represents global shipowners, said the Israel-Iran conflict seems to be escalating, causing concerns in the shipowner community and prompting a “modest drop” in the number of ships sailing through the area.
Bimco, which typically doesn’t encourage vessels to stay away from certain areas, said the situation has introduced an element of uncertainty.
“Circumstances and risk tolerance vary widely across shipowners. It appears that most shipowners currently choose to proceed, while some seem to stay away,” Larsen told CNBC by email.
“During periods of heightened security threats, freight rates and crew wages often rise, creating an economic incentive for some to take the risk of passing through conflict zones. While these dynamics may seem rudimentary, they are the very mechanisms that have sustained global trade through conflicts and wars for centuries,” he added.
The Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, is recognized as one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints.
In 2023, oil flows through the waterway averaged 20.9 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, accounting for about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption.
The inability of oil to traverse through the Strait of Hormuz, even temporarily, can ratchet up global energy prices, raise shipping costs and create significant supply delays.
Alongside oil, the Strait of Hormuz is also key for global container trade. That’s because ports in this region (Jebel Ali and Khor Fakkan) are transshipment hubs, which means they serve as intermediary points in global shipping networks.
The majority of cargo volumes from those ports are destined for Dubai, which has become a hub for the movement of freight with feeder services in the Persian Gulf, South Asia and East Africa.
Peter Tirschwell, vice president for maritime and trade at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said there have been indications that shipping groups are starting to “shy away” from navigating the Strait of Hormuz in recent days, without naming any specific firms.
“You could see the impact that the Houthi rebels had on shipping through the Red Sea. Even though there [are] very few recent attacks on shipping in that region, nevertheless the threat has sent the vast majority of container trade moving around the south of Africa. That has been happening for the past year,” Tirschwell told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.
“The ocean carriers have no plans to go back in mass into the Red Sea and so, the very threat of military activity around a narrow important routing like the Strait of Hormuz is going to be enough to significantly disrupt shipping,” he added.
Israel-Iran conflict lifts freight rates
Freight rates jumped after the Israeli attacks on Iran last week. Indeed, data published Monday from analytics firm Kpler showed Mideast Gulf tanker freight rates to China surged 24% on Friday to $1.67 per barrel.
The upswing in VLCC (very large crude carrier) freight rates reflected the largest daily move year-to-date, albeit from a relative lull in June, and reaffirmed the level of perceived risk in the area.
Analysts at Kpler said more increases in freight rates are likely as the situation remains highly unstable, although maritime war risk premium remains unchanged for now.
Missiles launched from Iran are intercepted as seen from Tel Aviv, Israel, June 16, 2025.
Ronen Zvulun | Reuters
David Smith, head of hull and marine liabilities at insurance broker McGill and Partners, said shipping insurance rates, at least for the time being, “remain stable with no noticeable increases since the latest hostilities between Israel and Iran.”
But that “could change dramatically,” depending on whether there is escalation in the area, he added.
“With War quotes only valid for 48 hours prior to entry into the excluded ‘Breach’ area, Underwriters do have the ability to rapidly increase premiums in line with the perceived risk,” Smith told CNBC by email.
The Hapag-Lloyd AG Leverkusen Express sails out of the Yangshan Deepwater Port, operated by Shanghai International Port Group, on Aug. 7, 2019.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A spokesperson for German-based container shipping liner Hapag-Lloyd said the threat level for the Strait of Hormuz remains “significant,” albeit without an immediate risk to the maritime sector.
Hapag-Lloyd said it does not foresee any bigger issues in crossing the waterway for the moment, while acknowledging that the situation could change in a “very short” period of time.
The company added that it has no immediate plans to traverse the Red Sea, however, noting it hasn’t done so since the end of December 2023.
— CNBC’s Lori Ann LaRocco contributed to this report.
China’s EV automakers have surged ahead of the competition in global EV sales, and a new report shows just how far ahead they are.
The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) just dropped its third annual Global Automaker Rating, showing that Chinese carmakers dominate the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) space. China now accounts for over 11 million EVs sold annually – over half of global EV sales.
Its massive domestic market has helped Chinese automakers build serious momentum. They’ve scaled up, improved tech, and are now setting the pace globally. Companies like Geely and SAIC have already hit 50% EV sales share, meeting their 2025 targets a full year early. In fact, Chinese automakers took the top five spots for ZEV class coverage, and five out of the top six for EV sales share.
Meanwhile, automakers in the US and Europe are trying to catch up. But they’re facing a dual challenge of falling behind on tech while navigating shaky regulatory environments.
The report also confirmed a big milestone: In 2024, BYD officially surpassed Tesla in global battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales for the first time. BYD’s BEV sales jumped 25%, and its combined BEV and plug-in hybrid sales climbed an impressive 47% year-over-year. Still, both BYD and Tesla remain in the “Leaders” category.
Automakers boosted energy efficiency, charging speed, and driving range thanks to newer, high-performance models.
“Our assessment revealed widespread improvement in BEV technology performance across the industry,” said Zifei Yang, ICCT’s global passenger vehicle lead. “GM and Honda made significant advancements by introducing high-performance models to their previously limited offerings, while companies like Geely, Chang’an, and Chery improved substantially with new high-performance EV lines.”
India’s Tata Motors also hit a turning point. For the first time, it graduated from ICCT’s “laggard” group to “transitioner,” thanks to new EVs and big moves on battery recycling and repurposing. While Japanese and South Korean automakers are still lagging behind, Honda and Nissan are inching forward. Honda launched its first US BEV, and Nissan finally clarified its ZEV targets.
One newer addition to this year’s report: a green steel metric. Since steel is the second-largest source of emissions in vehicle manufacturing (after batteries), ICCT now tracks which automakers are cutting emissions in the supply chain. European brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and VW earned high marks for sourcing renewable-powered green steel.
ICCT’s CEO, Drew Kodjak, summed it up: “The rapid evolution of the EV market in China has created technological and manufacturing advantages for companies there. For the wider global auto industry, this is no longer just about meeting future goals – it’s about remaining competitive today in a market that’s charging up.”
The full Global Automaker Rating, covering 21 major automakers, is now live on ICCT’s website.
Read more: EV prices dipped in May – and Tesla Model Y led the slide
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