Off the Kuff

Because I have an unhealthy obsession with this cursed topic, here’s a brief roundup of news stories about how the first day of Tesla’s long-expected robotaxi rollout in Austin went.

First, you should know that only pro-Tesla influencers were invited to take a ride in one of these vehicles.

A group of social media influencers and Tesla investors were invited to participate in the Robotaxi trial, with many posting about their experiences online. Passengers were accompanied by a Tesla employee in the front passenger seat to oversee the ride and intervene if necessary.

Participants were able to request a ride in the app for a flat fee of $4.20 in a geofenced area between 6 a.m. to midnight, according to an X post of the early access invitation from Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor and enthusiast.

“As an Early Access rider, you will be among the first to use our new Robotaxi app and experience an autonomous ride within our geofenced area in Austin,” read the invitation.

Users said they were pleased with the Robotaxi service as they were dropped off at supermarkets, coffee shops, restaurants and other locations around Austin.

[…]

Musk has promised self-driving Teslas for nearly a decade with little to show.

Musk first announced Tesla’s aspirations in the autonomous vehicle industry in 2013, predicting Tesla would be building a self-driving car by 2016 with 90% of miles driven.

Over the next three years, the company would continue its promise to launch self-driving cars while making advancements in Autopilot and launching various car models.

In 2016, Tesla released a 4 minute video showing a Tesla driving itself to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” Musk promoted the demonstration on X, Twitter at the time, writing, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all).” In 2023, Reuters reported the footage was staged with Musk’s knowledge.

Musk also promised that year, according to Business Insider, that a Tesla vehicle would be able to drive fully autonomously from Los Angeles to New York City by the end of 2017.

Over the next 7 years or so, Jalopnik reported, Musk would set deadlines for when Tesla expected to launch autonomous vehicles but when the time came would shift back the deadlines another year or so.

Gotta love the shade. This AP story gets into more of that.

Elon Musk promised in 2019 that driverless Tesla “robotaxis” would be on the road “next year,” but it didn’t happen. A year later, he promised to deliver them the next year, but that didn’t happen either.

Despite the empty pledges the promises kept coming. Last year in January, Musk said, “Next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis.”

Would you settle for 10 or 12?

Musk appears to be on the verge of making his robotaxi vision a reality with a test run of a small squad of self-driving cabs in Austin, Texas, that began Sunday. Reaching a million may take a year or more, however, although the billionaire should be able to expand the service this year if the Austin demo is a success.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, nor the challenges.

While Musk was making those “next year” promises, rival Waymo was busy deploying driverless taxis in Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin and other cities by using a different technology that allowed it to get to market faster. It just completed its 10 millionth paid ride.

[…]

The test is beginning modestly enough. Tesla is remotely monitoring the vehicles and putting a person in the passenger seat in case of trouble. The number of Teslas deployed will also be small — just 10 or 12 vehicles — and will only pick up passengers in a limited, geofenced area.

Musk has vowed that the service will quickly spread to other cities, eventually reaching hundreds of thousands if not a million vehicles next year.

Some Musk watchers on Wall Street are skeptical.

“How quickly can he expand the fleet?” asks Garrett Nelson, an analyst at CFRA. “We’re talking maybe a dozen vehicles initially. It’s very small.”

Morningstar’s Seth Goldstein says Musk is being classic Musk: Promising too much, too quickly.

“When anyone in Austin can download the app and use a robotaxi, that will be a success, but I don’t think that will happen until 2028,” he says. “Testing is going to take a while.”

Musk’s tendency to push up the stock high with a bit of hyperbole is well known among investors.

This Slate story goes even harder on the snark. I’ll leave it to you to read since the factual recitals are now familiar.

Not all of the reaction is negative – the stock market, for one, was pretty positive – and even I will have to admit that Musk’s many companies do achieve things. I’m just enjoying the side-eye he’s getting. And there were a couple of mishaps, nothing harmful but perhaps a reminder that for all of the bravado, Tesla and Musk are very much at the start of a still-long process.

Tesla finally has a robotaxi. Now comes the hard part.

The electric-vehicle maker deployed its first-ever driverless cabs in Austin, Texas, on Sunday in a small-scale test of carefully monitored Model Y vehicles. Next, the company faces the steep challenge of executing on CEO Elon Musk’s ambition to refine the software and upload it to millions of Teslas within a year or so.

Such a rapid expansion will prove extremely difficult, about a dozen industry analysts and autonomous-vehicle technology experts told Reuters. These observers expressed a range of views about Tesla’s prospects but all cautioned against assuming a light-speed robotaxi rollout.

Some pointed to advantages Tesla might exploit to overtake rivals including Alphabet’s Waymo and a host of Chinese auto and tech companies. Tesla has mass-manufacturing capacity, and it pioneered remote software updates it can use for self-driving upgrades. The automaker also does not use sensors such as radar and lidar like Waymo and most rivals; instead, it depends solely on cameras and artificial intelligence.

“A rollout could be really quick. If the software works, Tesla robotaxi could drive any road in the world,” said Seth Goldstein, a Morningstar senior equity analyst, while cautioning that Tesla is still “testing the product.”

In Austin, Tesla launched a choreographed experiment involving maybe a dozen cars, operating in limited geography, with safety monitors in the front passenger seat; remote “teleoperators”; plans to avoid bad weather; and hand-picked pro-Tesla influencers as passengers.

For years, Musk has said Tesla would soon operate its own autonomous ride-hailing service and also turn any Tesla, new or used, into a cash-generating robotaxi for its customers. That will be “orders of magnitude” more difficult than testing in Austin, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor focused on autonomous-driving regulation.

“It’s like announcing that, ‘I’m going to Mars’ and then, you know, going to Cleveland,” Smith said.

Musk has said Tesla will reach Mars, in that metaphor, quite quickly: “I predict that there will be millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously in the second half of next year,” he said in April.

Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Tesla shares ended 8.2% higher at $348.68 on Monday on investor enthusiasm over the robotaxi launch.

Given Tesla’s AI-dependent approach, its challenge will be machine-training robotaxis to handle complex traffic “edge cases,” said Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-engineering professor and autonomous-technology expert. That could take many years.

“Look, how long has it taken Waymo?” Koopman asked. “There’s no reason to believe Tesla will be any faster.”

It should be noted that Tesla is not only competing with Waymo. Have you heard of Zoox?

Amazon’s Zoox plans to enter the fray late this year with a custom-designed, van-like model loaded with sensors and cameras that it hopes will set it apart.

“We’re offering a unique experience for riders that we think they’ll prefer,” said cofounder and CTO Jesse Levinson, during a tour of the new Zoox robotaxi factory in Hayward, California, this week. “The ride quality, the carriage-style seating, the roomy interior–we think all of this is going to be what sets us apart.”

After 11 years of preparation and billions of investment dollars from Amazon, Zoox intends to launch its commercial robot ride service late this year in Las Vegas, with San Francisco, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta to follow. Rather than loading up existing vehicles with sensors and computers like Waymo has, Zoox’s plan from the outset has revolved around creating a robotaxi service with an electric model unlike any on the road.

There’s no steering wheel, pedals or external mirrors; it has sliding doors reminiscent of transit trains; and it’s designed as a bidirectional vehicle, with an identical front and rear. The Zoox robotaxi has a top speed of 75 miles per hour, though for now it won’t typically exceed 45 mph on urban and suburban runs. It’s also intended to operate for up to 16 hours per charge per day and remain in service for at least five years and 100,000 miles.

The combination of that long service life and ability to provide dozens of rides per day are key to creating a profitable business, even with a vehicle that costs much more than a conventional electric car, said CEO Aicha Evans. “We’re selling rides, not vehicles,” she said, declining to discuss the cost of producing the Zoox-mobile. “We want to offer the best experience at a competitive price.”

There’s a picture of a Zoox robotaxi in that story, and I have to say it looks weird, more like one of those Metro microtransit shuttles than something one would envision when one thinks of a “taxi”. But if Zoox is being backed by Amazon, you know they’ll have plenty of resources to make this go, and to manufacture a bunch of them. Don’t underestimate them.

One more look at the rollout:

Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised. The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service.

The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in some cases, Tesla is using chase cars and remote drivers as additional backup. (Some vehicles have been spotted without chase vehicles.)

The service is invite only at launch, according to Tesla’s website. A number of pro-Tesla influencers have received invites, which should raise questions about how unbiased these first critical reactions will be. Tesla hasn’t said when the service will be available to the general public.

The limited trial includes 10-20 Model Y vehicles with “Robotaxi” branding on the side. The fully autonomous Cybercab that was first revealed last year won’t be available until 2026 at the earliest. The service operates in a small, relatively safe area of Austin from 6AM to 12AM, avoiding bad weather, highways, airports, and complex intersections.

Despite those hours, the robotaxi service seems to have gotten off to a slow start. Several invitees had yet to receive the robotaxi app by 1PM ET on Sunday. Sawyer Merritt, who posts pro-Tesla content on X, said he saw 30 Waymo vehicles go by while waiting for Tesla’s robotaxi service to start. Musk posted at 1:12PM that the service would be available later that afternoon, adding that initial customers would pay a “flat fee” of $4.20 for rides — a weed joke with which Musk has a troubled history.

[…]

And then the rides began — and they appeared to be mostly uneventful. Several invitees livestreamed themselves summoning their first cars, interacting with the UI, and then arriving at their destination. Several videos lasted hours, as the invitees would conclude a trip and then hail another car immediately after. One tester, Bearded Tesla Guy, described the app’s interface as “basically Uber.” Many had some difficulty finding the pickup location of their waiting Tesla robotaxi.

“This is like Pokemon hunting,” one person on Herbert Ong’s livestream said, “but its robotaxi hunting.”

Once inside, the Tesla-employed safety monitor would ask the riders to show their robotaxi apps to prove their identities. Otherwise the safety monitors kept silent throughout the ride, despite riders trying to get them to talk. I’m assuming that Tesla will need to come up with some other way to identify their riders if they plan on removing the safety monitors from the passenger seat. Waymo, for example, asks customers to unlock their vehicle through the ridehail app.

There’s more, so read the rest. I’ll be very interested to see what the experience is like for the non-fanboys, when the service is rolled out to a wider audience and presumably a winder array of locations and options. In the meantime, there it is, after all this time.