Not quite as they wanted, but it is going.
After driverless Tesla Model Ys were spotted traversing Austin, Texas streets on Sunday morning, CEO Elon Musk posted on his social platform X that Tesla’s “robotaxi launch” would start this afternoon with rides for a flat fee of $4.20.
A Reuters witness saw several Tesla “robotaxis” on Sunday morning in a popular area of the Texas capital called South Congress with no one in the driver’s seat but one person in the passenger seat.
Tesla planned to have front-seat riders acting as “safety monitors,” though it remained unclear how much control they would have over the vehicles. Videos of driverless Teslas have also been posted on social media but it was not known if the vehicles carried any passengers.
As the date of the planned robotaxi launch approached, Texas lawmakers moved to enact rules on autonomous vehicles in the state. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, on Friday signed legislation requiring a state permit to operate self-driving vehicles.
The law does not take effect until September 1, but the governor’s approval of it on Friday signals state officials from both parties want the driverless-vehicle industry to proceed cautiously. A group of Democratic state lawmakers earlier this week asked Tesla to delay its planned robotaxi trial because of the legislation.
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In recent days, Tesla has sent invites to a select group of Tesla online influencers for a small and carefully monitored robotaxi trial, which the company has said would include 10 or 20 Model Y vehicles operated in a limited zone of Austin.
See here and here for the previous updates. KUT has more on the concerns that had been expressed by legislators, whi asked Tesla to delay their rollout until September 1 when the new law takes effect.
Brad Templeton at Forbes has an interesting view of these developments.
Tesla’s much-anticipated June 22 “no one in the vehicle” Robotaxi launch in Austin is not ready. Instead, Tesla has announced to its invite-only passengers that it will operate a limited service with Tesla employees on board the vehicle to maintain safety. Tesla will use an approach that was used in 2019 by Russian robotaxi company Yandex, putting the safety driver in the passenger’s seat rather than the driver’s seat. (Yandex’s robotaxi was divested from Russian and now is called AVRide.)
Having an employee on board, commonly called a safety driver, is the approach that every robocar company has used for testing, including testing of passenger operations. Most companies spend many years (Waymo spent a decade) testing with safety drivers, and once they are ready to take passengers, there are typically some number of years testing in that mode, though the path to removing the safety driver depends primarily on evaluation of the safety case for the vehicle, and less on the presence of passengers.
Tesla has put on some other restrictions—rides will be limited to 6 a.m. to midnight (the opposite of Cruise’s first operations, which were only at night) and riders come from an invite-only list (as was also the case for Waymo, and Cruise and others in their early days). Rides will be limited to a restricted service area (often mistakenly called a “geofence”) which avoids complex and difficult streets and intersections. Rides will be unavailable in inclement weather, which also can happen with other vehicles, though fairly rarely today. Tesla FSD is known to disable itself if rain obscures some of its cameras—only the front cameras have a rain wiper. The fleet will be small.
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Almost all vehicles use a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla’s will be in the passenger seat, in a situation similar to that used by driving instructors for student human drivers. While unconfirmed by Tesla, the employee in the passenger seat can grab the wheel and steer. Because stock Teslas have fully computer-controlled brake and acceleration, they might equip the driver with electronic pedals. Some reports have suggested they have a hand controller or other ways to command the vehicle to brake.
There is no value to putting the safety driver on the passenger’s side. It is no safer than being behind the wheel, and believed by most to be less safe because of the unusual geometry. It’s hard to come up with any reason other than just how it looks. Tesla can state the vehicles have “nobody in the driver’s seat” in order to attempt to impress the public. The driving school system works, so it’s not overtly dangerous, but in that case there’s an obvious reason for it that’s not optics.
That said, most robocar prototypes, including Tesla supervised FSD, are reasonably safe with capable safety drivers. A negligent and poorly managed safety driver in an Uber ATG test vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona when the safety driver completely ignored her job, but otherwise these systems have a good record. The combination of Tesla Autopilot and a supervising driver has a reasonable record. (The record is not nearly as good as some people think Tesla claims. Every quarter, Tesla publishes a deeply misleading report comparing the combination of Tesla Autopilot plus supervisor to the general crash rate, but they report airbag deployments for the Teslas mostly on freeways and compare it without general crash numbers on all roads for general drivers. This makes it seem Autopilot is many times safer than regular drivers when it’s actually similar, a serious and deceitful misrepresentation.)
As noted, Yandex, now AVRide, has used safety drivers in the passenger seat, and has done so in Austin—also speculated to be mostly for optics, though there are some legal jurisdictions where companies shave made this move because the law requires safety drivers and they hope to convey an aura of not needing them. This has also been the case in China. When Cruise did their first “driverless” demo ride in San Francisco, they had an employee in the passengers seat.
So Tesla has been ready to run with safety drivers for years. What’s tested here isn’t the safety of the cars, but all the complexity of handling passengers, including the surprising problems of good PuDo (Pick-up/Drop-off). Whether Teslas can operate a safe robotaxi with nobody onboard, particularly with their much more limited sensor hardware, remains to be seen.
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The question for Tesla will be whether the use of safety drivers is a very temporary thing, done just because they weren’t quite ready but needed to meet the announced date, or a multi-year program as it has been for most teams. Tesla is famous for not meeting the forecast ship dates for its FSD system, so it’s not shocking that this pattern continues. The bigger question is whether they can do it at all. Tesla FSD 13, the version available to Tesla owners, isn’t even remotely close to robotaxi ready. If Tesla has made a version which is closer, through extra work, training and severe limitations of the problem space, it’s still a big accomplishment. This will be seen in the coming months. Two robocar teams had severe interactions with pedestrians, resulting in the end of both teams. Tesla knows they must not make mistakes.
So I dunno. I wouldn’t trust anything from Elmo, but you already knew that. We’ll have to see what the Austin population of robotaxi-curious people think – again, you know where I stand on that. KVUE has more.