The time is finally here: there are actual driverless Tesla Robotaxis on the road, at least in a portion of Austin, Texas, as of this weekend. And thanks to their ridership of exclusively Tesla influencers, almost all of the miles they’ve put under their belt has been filmed or livestreamed, which gives us plenty of footage to discover what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong.

Tesla’s Robotaxi service went live on Sunday around noon, at least for the relatively small number of Tesla influencers who were invited to ride.

It’s a limited launch in several other ways, too – it’s geofenced to somewhere around 30 square miles in South Austin which Tesla spent additional time mapping and testing in, it’s supported by backup teleoperation, it doesn’t operate from 12am-6am or in bad weather, and every car has a “safety monitor” in the passenger seat with access to controls to stop the vehicle.

Nevertheless, there are Teslas without someone in the driver’s seat, and that’s still a step forward, and partial delivery of a promise that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been making for about a decade now (though there are still other unfulfillied promises on the table).

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Because of that decade of promises, a lot of eyes have been on this launch – and also because of the fact that every invited rider is chasing views on social media, so we have a lot of footage just a few days in.

To be clear, this is not the first driverless taxi on the road. GM used to operate robotaxis through subsidiary Cruise (more on that in the Take), and Google has its Waymo robotaxis in multiple US cities (it just expanded its service area last week) and is even testing overseas.

So there’s already plenty of text and video out there talking about the experience of riding in non-Tesla self-driving taxis (like my long writeup and video of my rides in Waymo’s driverless taxi during a chaotic Venice Beach weekend).

But, Tesla is Tesla, and there’s always more attention on what Tesla does. So lets put a little more attention on the various errors that we’ve seen from Robotaxis in the 3 days since launch.

We did link to several of these videos, and others, in a post the day of the launch, when vibes were quite positive from the Tesla fans who were invited to ride. In the first few hours, there were few issues.

But, soon, errors started creeping in. We added some as updates to that article as they came in, but we thought this article would be better to compile them all (and thanks to r/SelfDrivingCars which compiled several others)

Indecision leads to driving into an oncoming lane

In Tesla Daily’s first Robotaxi ride, the Tesla tries to attempt a left turn one intersection early, gets indecisive, then continues on, driving through an oncoming lane for a time before re-entering a left turn lane ahead. See the whole exchange starting at around 7:08 in this video:

Robotaxi stops in middle of street for about a minute

Dirty Tesla pressed the “pull over” button to get dropped off early, and the car got confused and tried to let him out in the middle of a left turn lane. Support ended up “resuming the ride” and the Robotaxi found a nearby gas station to drop him off at. The whole interaction took about a minute, starting at ~8:58 in the video:

Robotaxi drops rider off in an intersection, stays there for ~55 seconds

Farzad also asked for a slightly early dropoff, and the car stopped quite early… as in, gridlocked in an intersection and leaking out into one lane of traffic. Thanks to wide Texas streets for letting others by, I guess. 38:04 in the video:

Tesla phantom brakes when caught by sun glare

Kim Java had a hard “phantom braking” moment, where the vehicle hits the brakes for no particular reason, while driving into the setting sun. 10:13 in the video:

Safety monitor intervenes, presses “stop in lane” to avoid UPS truck

In what seems to be the first true intervention caught on video, Dave Lee was approaching a parking spot when a UPS truck stopped in the lane and started backing up. The Tesla “safety monitor” in the front seat wisely anticipated the situation and was hovering the “stop in lane” button, then pressed it when it seemed like the car wouldn’t stop on its own. The car then remained in position while the UPS truck backed up, giving it just enough room, but it probably would have been nicer if it backed up a little more. Excellent job by the safety monitor here, really. 28:53 in the video:

The previous day, Dave Lee was getting picked up by a Robotaxi in a parking lot and it hit a curb in the parking lot right at the start of the drive (at 0:39 in the video).

Robotaxi hits a bump too fast, then goes 27 in a 15mph zone

Farzad was heading to a disc golf course on a low-speed street. The Robotaxi handled one speed bump well, but then took another one too fast. It then drove past a 15mph speed limit sign, slowed down for a deer, and then picked speed back up to 27mph. The whole exchange starts around 14:27:

In the same video, starting at 4:56, the car seems not to know what to do about a shopping bag in the road – it brakes, then considers going around it, then just runs it over.

Tesla brakes for nearby police, exterior view

Edward Niedermeyer, a longtime Tesla hater, posted a video from an exterior angle of a Robotaxi behaving strangely nearby police vehicles. The Robotaxi passes by one police vehicle with lights on in a parking lot, then brakes rather hard when it passes by another police car blocking a side intersection, then passes by another at normal speed, then brakes hard for a fourth despite it being in a parking lot behind a curb. Slowing down would be appropriate behavior in this instance, but the braking events seem more sudden than necessary, and inconsistent given the position of the police vehicles involved.

Safety monitor intervenes, hops in drivers seat in parking lot

In what seems to be the second intervention, Dirty Tesla had just gotten out of the taxi and while it was trying to leave the parking lot, it nearly ran into a parked car. The Safety monitor intervened to stop the car, then apparently got out and drove the car away manually (not captured in video).

Electrek’s Take

Yes, the title is lighthearted. I was going for irony.

The fact is that there are issues with Tesla’s approach to self-driving, and these various videos show them.

Tesla drivers are well acquainted with the current limitations and quirks of FSD as well, many of which were shown off in the clips above. It doesn’t do well with sun glare (neither do you, but you can wear sunglasses and/or flip down the visor for a little help), it sometimes misses speed bumps, it phantom brakes, and it has weird moments of indecision sometimes. C’mon, we’ve all seen it, let’s be honest with ourselves here.

As best I can tell from hundreds of miles away, these vehicles exhibit pretty similar behavior to the FSD in the vehicles I’ve driven. It works pretty well a lot of the time, but most of the time I’m also glad I’m there in the driver’s seat so I can tell it to STOP CHANGING LANES FOR THE 5TH TIME THIS MINUTE FOR PETE’S SAKE.

Tesla’s system also uses only cameras, not LiDAR, and most experts (including Tesla engineers) agree that incorporating multiple sensing modes is the correct path to take (here’s more on that). Tesla is using only cameras because it’s cheaper, and thus more scalable (though LiDAR prices have dropped rapidly).

In particular, LiDAR does better in poor weather than cameras do. We haven’t seen particularly bad weather yet for Robotaxi (there was rain in Austin on the morning of the Robotaxi’s launch – and the launch coincidentally did not happen until afternoon), and Tesla’s FSD system does work in the rain.

But even I, in famously sunny Southern California, have encountered a rainstorm severe enough for FSD to suddenly shut off and tell me to take over. So, in the very conditions that you’d definitely want an enclosed space to keep you safe from the weather, Robotaxi might not work.

So far, the errors we’ve seen above have not caused any sort of damage, either to Tesla occupants or the general public (except for some curb rash, perhaps), but as miles get put on the system, it is inevitable that something will happen.

When something does happen, the public will not respond kindly to it. Recall when GM’s Cruise robotaxi got into an accident in San Francisco – which was actually entirely the fault of a human driver. A human driver struck a pedestrian, who was then pushed into the path of a Cruise vehicle which didn’t have time to stop, and hit the pedestrian as well.

This was largely reported as a self-driving car crash, even though Cruise didn’t cause the accident in the first place. Cruise was, however, responsible for having poor after-crash behavior, as the car didn’t realize the pedestrian was stuck under the vehicle and dragged her on the road for several feet, and then hid this fact from investigators. As a result, its license was pulled in California and it soon shut down elsewhere as well.

We are all aware of how many unpredictable things happen on the road every day, and how many problems are caused by human drivers. Autonomous technology does promise solutions to that, particularly in its theoretical ability to make decisions quickly. But autonomous technology has heretofore not been great at understanding what to do in unexpected situations, like the Cruise issue above.

Waymo has had issues as well, one of which you can see in my own experience with the system, where the car I was in got stuck for several minutes trying and failing to make a left turn into a crowded street. Or this clip where it gets stuck in a parking lot and needs a manual driver.

One pattern I do notice is that a lot of Tesla’s errors seem to happen when the car is dropping off or picking up riders. This could be because parking lots are more complex spaces than roads, or simply because the ability to park is a newer feature for FSD. In my time in Waymos, it also seems the least decisive when trying to find parking or pickup spots.

But the exceptional part about these Tesla issues is that it’s only been three days, and there are reportedly only 10 cars and 20-some riders using the system. Tesla has always said that it could scale its solution to an entire fleet with a single software update, without geofencing, thus turning the entire fleet autonomous overnight.

And Tesla has also always been famous for the “move fast and break things” approach which is so common in Silicon Valley. This is all well and good for tech, but when you’re dealing with thousands of pounds of metal going down the road near pedestrians, things can get serious real quick.

And so, its questionable that Tesla is operating in a regulatory vacuum and doesn’t want the public to see details about its program or FSD safety data. We saw what hiding information from regulators did to Cruise, and it certainly wouldn’t advance Tesla’s progress if the same happened.

Thankfully, Tesla does seem to be taking a more measured approach than we might have expected, given its inclusion of safety monitors who we’ve already seen avoid two accidents in just the first three days of operation. But that’s not scalable, and while Tesla fans have pointed out that Waymo also started with safety monitors, it didn’t charge fees or take public rides during that testing phase, and Tesla is doing both.

It remains to be seen if Tesla’s approach will be scalable faster than Waymo’s (or MOIA’s, or Zoox, or anyone else’s), but given the first few days of limited operation in Austin, the dream of expanding everywhere overnight does seem unlikely.

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