Last Updated on: 23rd June 2025, 06:39 pm
One of my colleagues here at CleanTechnica insists the Tesla robotaxi plan is little more than a pump & dump stock manipulation ploy. If that is so, it is working wonderfully well. Tesla shares were up 11 percent in early trading on Monday, June 23, and closed the day 8.23% up. The service in Austin began on Sunday, June 22, and is available only to certain Tesla employees and retail investors.
Rob Maurer was one of the privileged few. He made a video of a 10-mile-long trip he took in a Tesla robotaxi and posted it on X — where else? Maurer hosted the “Tesla Daily” podcast from 2017 to 2024. The video is 22 minutes long, so unless you have little to do, you may not want to watch the whole thing. But if you do, you will see that the car he was riding in at one point entered an intersection in the left-turn-only lane. What happened next was a bit concerning.
The Tesla hesitated to make the turn, swerved to the right, then drove into an unoccupied lane meant for traffic moving in the opposite direction. A honking horn was heard on the video as the Tesla re-entered the correct lane by crossing a double-yellow line — you know, the one that every driver knows is not to be crossed — ever — under any circumstances?
Uh, oh. Is this what Elon Musk meant when he posted last week on his personal antisocial media platform that “We are being super paranoid about safety”? Two other passengers shared videos that showed the Teslas they were riding in exceeding the posted speed limit. The one transporting Sawyer Merritt, a major Tesla supporter and investor, was shown on the video going 35 mph shortly after passing a “Speed Limit 30” sign.
In a separate livestream from Herbert Ong, a YouTuber with more than 123,000 subscribers, he said the vehicle was going faster than the posted limit of 35 miles per hour. “It’s going at 39 right now, which is perfect, right, because I don’t want to drive at 35, and it’s driving at the same flow of traffic. If everyone else is driving at this speed, you want to be at the same speed.” Well, perhaps, but some may question whether they want a computer-controlled car to be making up its own mind about what a safe speed might be.
Since it is programmed to match the speed of cars around it, if someone in a Honda Civic with a fart can decides to do 50 mph in school zone, would the Tesla think to itself, “Well, that fool is doing it, so it must be OK for me to go that fast too”? This raises certain moral questions like the ones our mothers used to pepper us with, such as, “If Billy jumps off a bridge, does that mean you should too?” Moral relativism and computers seem like a slippery slope to us.
A Favorable Environment For Robotaxi Launch
The New York Times says that Austin appeals to autonomous driving companies in part because Texas imposes fewer regulations on them than other than states, such as California. In a blatant example of government overreach, Texas forbids local governments from exerting control over the use of autonomous vehicles in their cities and towns. When Bloomberg contacted Tesla, NHTSA, and the Austin police department to ask for clarification about the actions noted in those various videos, all three agencies stonewalled.
So far as we know, the city of Austin has entered into a nondisclosure agreement with Tesla that prevents the city from making any information about the robotaxi program from becoming public. “FSD is an immature system,” Matthew Wansley, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York told the New York Times.
In Austin, pockets of community-based opposition have appeared. Last week, a small group of protesters gathered in a park in Austin Park, with an inflated blowup effigy of Elon Musk. Blythe Christopher was holding a sign that said, “We don’t need no stinkin’ Robotaxis.” Self-driving technology is advancing quickly without enough thought about what it will mean for society, Adam Greenfield of Safe Streets Austin told the New York Times. “The history of disruptive technology is often that we let it wash over us and later on we go back and try to deal with the downside.” Many will recognize this as the age-old problem of putting a genie back in a bottle after it has been allowed out.
For the time being, each robotaxi has a human monitor riding in the front passenger seat who verifies the identity of each rider and who has a “kill switch” that can immobilize the car in an emergency. Apparently, that device was not used when the car Rob Maurer was riding in found itself in the left-turn-only lane. Once the ride begins, the monitor does not interact with the passengers, so if you like your New York City cab driver who fills you in on the latest Yankees news while on the way to your destination, you’re out of luck in a Tesla r0botaxi.
According to The Verge, a team of virtual monitors follows the movements of each robotaxi. Presumably, they are able to avert serious incidents, such as running into the back of an emergency vehicle with its lights flashing — something that can occur much too frequently in Teslas operating in full self driving mode.
Musk Being Musk
True to his nature, Elon couldn’t help but inject a big helping of hype into the robotaxi launch. He bragged that Tesla would have more than a thousand robotaxi vehicles in service within a few months. Then he did what in his drug-addled mind passes for humor when he posted that robotaxi customers would pay a flat fee of $4.20 each ride. 420. Get it, wink wink, nudge nudge? That’s the number stoners often use as a reference to drugs, especially marijuana. It is also the number that got Musk in hot water with the SEC several years ago when he said he was going to take the company private and had secured a buyer who would pay $420 a share.
So far, the start of robotaxi service in Austin has gone rather smoothly, although all the passengers have been confirmed Tesla supporters, like Sam Korus, director of research, autonomous technology, and robots at ARK Investment Management.
He told the New York Times that by using data collected from millions of Teslas already on the road, the company will be able to improve its software quickly using artificial intelligence. He went on to say Tesla will be able to mass produce its robotaxis faster and more affordably than other companies. “Having a structurally less expensive vehicle should mean it’s extremely difficult to compete with Tesla,” he said.
A lot of people certainly hope that is true, but many are frankly worn out by Elon’s ceaseless barrage of promises that almost never happen when the great man says they will. He is like the boy who cried wolf, and the fact that his status as the richest person ever in the history of the world is directly tied to the price of Tesla stock does make some people wonder if this is all really just a dog & pony show designed to bamboozle folks who are unsophisticated investors.
Tweets from October 2016.
Before the robotaxi experiment can be declared a success, Tesla will need to log thousands of journeys with no significant drama. Can Tesla pull that off? Check back about a year from now.
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