Tesla is poised to finally launch its long-awaited robotaxi service this weekend in Austin, Texas.
But there’s a huge, embarrassing catch. As Electrek reports, the self-driving cabs will have a human “safety monitor” plunked in the front passenger seat — a far cry from Elon Musk’s bold promise that his automaker would be hosting unsupervised rides this summer.
The hilarious admission was disclosed in the recent invitations Tesla sent out to those interested in participating in the robotaxi service (read: X-addicted pro-Tesla “influencers” and other Musk sycophants, according to Electrek.)
Scheduled to debut on June 22, the robotaxi launch will start with just ten vehicles in operation, which will be confined to a “geofenced,” pre-mapped zone of Austin. These won’t be the two-seater, purpose built taxis known as the “Cybercab” that Musk unveiled last October. Instead, the robotaxis will be regular Model Y cars installed with an experimental version of the automaker’s self-driving software. And one more tiny thing that will set them apart: if footage that Musk re-shared last week is any indication, the cars will be adorned with their own unique branding, which is literally just the word “robotaxi” in an awful graffiti font.
It’s a belated debut, and comes over a week after the date that reports had suggested it would launch. Behind the scenes, Tesla engineers were reportedly struggling to get the service up and running on time, with development said to be behind schedule. Amidst that uncertainty, Musk tweeted a “tentative” launch date of June 22, adding that Tesla was “being super paranoid about safety.”
The robotaxi service may now be right around the corner, but it will be nothing like what Musk promised it would be. As far back as 2019, Musk asserted that Tesla would have one million robotaxis on the road by “next year,” duping his loyal customers with the vision that their Teslas would soon be able to convert, with a mere software update, into self-sufficient cabbies that could ferry passengers and make money for them on the side.
That obviously hasn’t proven to be the case. The automaker has struggled to fine-tune its misleadingly named “Full Self-Driving” driver assistance software, which has been involved in multiple deadly crashes and is currently the subject of a federal investigation after a car with the driving mode activated struck and killed an elderly pedestrian.
With black marks like those, Tesla hasn’t made a convincing case that it’ll be capable of making the step up to deploying robotaxi software which operates without human supervision — hence the recently disclosed presence of the “safety monitors.” It’s also shied away from revealing any details about its use of human teleoperators to monitor and control the vehicles remotely when the software fails. Was the infrastructure to have these key personnel watching from afar not ready in time, and that’s part of the reason why Tesla is having an employee physically in the robotaxis? It’s hard to say.
To be clear, when robotaxi leader Waymo first started testing passenger rides, it also had human supervisors physically present, Electrek noted (with its fair share of controversies, too). The difference in this case is that Musk spent all his time hyping up a full-blown launch, has repeatedly insisted that his cars would be ready to roll without a safety chaperone, and has never passed up an opportunity to exaggerate his company’s capabilities to a preposterous degree.
In an earnings call in January, the world’s richest man made it loud and clear that “Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin.” He also insisted in a May interview that over 1,000 Tesla robotaxis would be roaming the city “within a few months” of launching. Further beggaring belief, in that same interview he repeated his one-million-robotaxis promise, this time setting the deadline for achieving that number at the end of 2026.
With the end of the month quickly approaching — and very little show for it — it seems that Musk is trying to save face by pushing whatever semblance of robotaxi capabilities Tesla has available out onto the streets.
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