The robotaxis that aren’t

Musk’s SpaceX rockets explode, sometimes on the launch pad. Now, Musk’s promise of Tesla robotaxis has also exploded.

“Tesla’s much-anticipated June 22 “no one in the vehicle” “unsupervised” 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. . . . 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.

 

“In addition to Musk’s statements about the vehicle being unsupervised, with nobody inside, in general the removal of the safety driver is the biggest milestone in development of a true robotaxi, not an incremental step that can be ignored. As such, Tesla has yet to meet its goals. A safety driver-based service can be built with a system that needs once/day intervention. A no-safety-driver system needs to be able to go over 500,000 miles, a human lifetime of driving, a very different bar.”

There are other restrictions that make these vehicles far from the sort of free-range service you expect in taxis, Lyft or Uber. The Tesla robotaxi myth marches on.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/06/22/tesla-misses-robotaxi-launch-date-goes-with-safety-drivers/

 

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