Good luck, Elmo. You’re gonna need it.
Tesla’s long-awaited entry into the robotaxi market — expected later this month — is coming to Austin, Texas, which has emerged as a key battleground for self-driving technology.
CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on X last week that the company has been testing Model Y vehicles with no safety drivers on board in the Texas capital for several days.
Tesla’s Austin robotaxi service will kick off with 10 vehicles and expand to thousands, moving into more cities if the launch goes well, Musk said in a May 20 interview with CNBC’s David Faber.
But while the market remains nascent, Tesla already faces a hefty amount of competition.
The electric vehicle maker is one of several companies using Austin as a testing ground and debut market for self-driving technology. They’re all taking advantage of Austin’s robotics and AI talent, tech-savvy residents, affordable housing relative to other technology hubs and a city layout with horizontal traffic lights and wide roads that makes it particularly conducive to mapping software.
But the biggest reason they love Texas may be the state’s robotaxi-friendly regulation.
Already in Austin are Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, Volkswagen subsidiary ADMT, and startup Avride.
Waymo began offering robotaxi rides in Austin with Uber in March. Zoox started testing there last year, while ADMT has been testing Volkswagen’s electric ID vehicles in the city since 2023. Avride is headquartered in Austin and is testing its autonomous vehicles and delivery robots in the Texas capital, with plans to offer a robotaxi service in the city at some point.
“The winners of the space are emerging, and it’s just a matter of scaling,” said Toby Snuggs, head of sales and partnerships at Avride.
According to Uber, its Austin launch with Waymo has proved successful thus far. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in May that riders are choosing the robotaxis over regular cars, and the company is preparing to scale its Austin autonomous fleet to hundreds of vehicles in the coming months, ahead of a robotaxi expansion into Atlanta later this year.
“These approximately 100 vehicles are now busier than over 99% of all drivers in Austin in terms of completed trips per day,” Khosrowshahi told investors in May.
Avride, which spun out of former parent company Yandex last year, has delivery robots in a fleet of about a dozen Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in downtown Austin. The company said it plans to expand its Austin fleet to 100 vehicles later this year and aims to begin offering robotaxi rides in Dallas with Uber in 2025.
Tesla primarily relies on camera-based systems and computer vision to navigate its vehicles rather than the Waymo model of using sophisticated sensors such as lidar and radar. Tesla’s “generalized” approach to robotaxis is more ambitious and less expensive than Waymo’s, Musk said during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call with investors in April. Musk has been promising Tesla investors that a self-driving car is on the way for roughly a decade and has repeatedly missed self-imposed deadlines.
“There’s probably a lot of ways it can be done, but we’re the only ones that have done it,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa in May. “We’ve been doing it 24 hours a day for almost five years. And so to us, it’s really important to focus on safety … and then cost — not cost and then safety.”
“You have to be able to see at night, you have to be able to have this vision that’s better than humans,” Mawakana said.
See here for the previous update. Didn’t realize there were that many robotaxi pilots going on in Austin right now. That’s either super awesome or a massive pain in the ass, depending on one’s perspective.
This story was from before the epic war or words between Elmo and Trump on Thursday, in which among other things President Wannabe Autocrat threatened to cut Musk and Tesla off from federal contracts. That would put a crimp in Elmo’s bottom line, and as the crown jewel in his stock price-based empire is Tesla and Tesla ain’t doing so well lately, he really needs his self-driving tech to be a big hit. Which is why it would be such a shame if nobody in Austin chose to use his shitty business, wouldn’t it? Do not engage, do not engage, do not engage.
There’s a side story here that’s worth noting, and could be a big deal for this rollout.
Tesla is test-launching about 10 to 20 autonomous Model Y vehicles in some parts of Austin, with plans to expand to a thousand within a few months. The June robotaxi debut will be invite-only at launch, so if you’re not in with the richest man in the world you’ll have to wait your turn.
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas visited Tesla’s Palo Alto office in California and learned that the robotaxis will be teleoperated with remote operators watching the vehicles through embedded cameras, to control it incase it gets stuck, Business Insider reports.
There will also be “audio inputs” to pick up siren sounds from emergency vehicles, a Tesla rep said in an April earnings call.
The robotaxis will rely on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Both have been linked to hundreds of nonfatal incidents, while Autopilot has been connected to 51 reported fatalities and FSD has been linked to at least two deaths as of October 2024, The Verge reports. In early May, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration raised questions about Tesla’s (FSD) technology to learn more about its development before its use in robotaxis.
More specifically, the NHTSA wanted to know how well the vehicles will operate in bad weather or reduced roadway visibility conditions such as sun glare, fog, dust, rain, and snow. NHTSA gave Tesla a June 19 deadline to submit this information.
The agency has been investigating crashes involving Teslas (FSD) feature for years, with two deaths having linked to the technology, according to the Verge. More recently, a Tesla vehicle using its latest FSD reportedly ran over a child-size mannequin crossing in front of a stopped school bus.
Tesla seems to be particularly worried about the public knowing some of the details about its safety record.
Tesla is trying to prevent the city of Austin, Texas, from releasing public records to Reuters involving the EV maker’s planned launch of self-driving robotaxis in the city this month.
The news agency in February requested communications between Tesla and Austin officials over the previous two years. The request followed CEO Elon Musk’s announcement in January that Tesla would launch fare-collecting robotaxis on Austin public streets.
Austin public-information officer Dan Davis told Reuters on April 1 that “third parties” had asked the city to withhold the records to protect their “privacy or property interests.” Austin officials on April 7 requested an opinion on the news agency’s request from the Texas Attorney General’s office, which handles public-records disputes.
On April 16, an attorney for Tesla wrote the AG objecting to the release of “confidential, proprietary, competitively sensitive commercial, and/or trade secret information” contained in emails between Tesla and Austin officials. The Tesla attorney wrote that providing the documents to Reuters would reveal “Tesla’s deployment procedure, process, status and strategy” and “irreparably harm Tesla.”
Tesla and the Texas Attorney General’s office did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Neal Falgoust, who oversees public records issues for Austin’s Law Department, said the city “takes no position on the confidential nature of the information at issue” but is required to seek the Attorney General’s opinion when “a third-party asserts that their information is proprietary and should not be released.”
[…]
In an April 23 response to Tesla’s letter, a Reuters lawyer wrote that Tesla’s intent to deploy the unproven technology on Texas roadways makes its plans “an issue of enormous importance to Texas and the public at large” and underscored the public’s right to know.
Falgoust, the Austin law department official, did not respond to questions about whether the public was entitled to information about Tesla’s driverless technology.
Texas state law requires the Attorney General’s office to decide within 45 business days, which would be next week.
I feel like Trump Bestie Elon Musk would get concierge service from the AG’s office on this request. But Trump Sworn Enemy/Bitter Ex Elon Musk, probably not so much. I can’t wait to see how this turns out. But whichever way this goes, all you need to know is not to use this service. Let Elmo flail. Let him deal with the consequences of his actions. Do not engage.