AUSTIN—If Tesla Robotaxis were halfway as ubiquitous as Elon Musk’s posts about the self-driving possibilities of his company’s vehicles, this city would be crawling with these cars.
The reality of booking Robotaxi rides during SXSW here was mixed: They were only intermittently available, and the trips were basically fine.
Over five rides—three at night, two in the day, none on highways or in rush-hour traffic—I didn’t see these modified Model Y cars commit any road-safety violations worse than slightly exceeding the speed limit to keep up with traffic.
And at no point did I see any intervention from the human “safety operator” who occupied the front passenger seat on every ride. Two of them were willing to engage in idle banter, two others stayed silent, and one outright refused my attempt at conversation: “I’m sorry, I’m only here for safety reasons.” (Fortunately, Robotaxis allow you to link your music streaming account so you can have your own personal soundtrack.)
Like the Waymo self-driving cars I’ve used in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Robotaxis I experienced ranged from cautious to deferential on the street. One waited several minutes at an intersection as cars kept rolling past until somebody in a pickup truck took pity and paused long enough for the car’s software to decide it was safe to turn right.
Like a Waymo, each Robotaxi did not move until I had buckled in and tapped the “Start Ride” button on the rear touchscreen.
Unlike Waymos, which employ a sophisticated and expensive stack of radar and LiDAR sensors as well as cameras to map their surroundings, Teslas rely only on cameras. The dashboard touchscreen in a Robotaxi depicts how the car sees its surroundings; I did not see it miss any vehicles or people along the way, even if it sometimes displayed a cyclist as a pedestrian.
Is it a good look for a robotaxi app to look like the work of a 14-year-old boy? (Rob Pegoraro)
A Buggy App, But Decently Priced Rides
But before I could get anywhere via Robotaxi, I had to wait for Tesla’s iPhone-only Robotaxi app to connect me to one. And on Saturday, perhaps the busiest day at SXSW, that experience was dreadful: The app kept showing “High service demand” errors that instructed me to “Please come back later.”
At other times, it displayed wait times exceeding 20 minutes, or failed in a more erratic manner. One apparently successful booking lasted only seconds before the app showed a “Your ride has been canceled” notification, while another attempt resulted in a nonsensical “No route available” error.
And when I finally got a booking to work Saturday night, the app required me to add a credit card even though I had already saved the same card to the Tesla account I used to sign in.
Things improved considerably over the next three days, with wait times no worse than 15 minutes and sometimes as low as 10. That was better than what I might have expected from a fleet that hasn’t grown much from its small-scale start—a third-party Robotaxi-tracking site counted just 38 on Wednesday, with only five listed as operating “unsupervised.”
Robotaxis can read speed limits creatively. (Rob Pegoraro)
Fares on my one to two-mile journeys were cheaper than they’d be on Lyft and Uber, something previous research has noted, but not always by much. For example, a 2.15-mile ride Monday night from downtown to a rented house on the east side cost me $6.01, while Lyft’s app quoted fares starting at $6.98 and Uber’s at $16.92.
I saw similar patterns in the other trips I took:
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$6.48 to go 1.2 miles from one east side bar to another Saturday night;
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$6.04 for a 2.18-mile ride from an east side food truck lot to downtown Sunday morning;
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$6.02 for a 2.16-mile trip from downtown to my abode very late Sunday night;
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$5.79 to go 1.99 miles from the same food truck lot to another downtown location on Tuesday morning.
Had I not been taking Robotaxi rides for research purposes, those two morning trips would have involved a Capital Metro bus instead—with a $1.25 fare, no transfer needed. On the other hand, I could not use Robotaxi to get to or from the airport, as Tesla’s service area, even after recent expansions, doesn’t extend far enough from downtown.
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Each pickup took place within a car length or two of my location, but four of the dropoffs happened at least a block away, despite spaces being visible closer to the address I’d set.
On most of these rides, the app finished by requesting a rating of one to five lightning bolts and inviting me to leave a tip—with the suggested amounts, $.69 and $4.20, reflecting Musk’s two favorite numbers.
Actually going through with that silly suggestion yielded a “Just Kidding” screen. This part of the app’s UX raises a question: What improvements could Tesla have made to the app if its developers hadn’t had to indulge the CEO’s arrested development?
The Bigger Picture: More Likely to Crash
Self-driving cars are deeply polarizing, sparking some very human anxieties about loss of control—even though humans are often objectively terrible drivers.
And Tesla’s attempts in this area invite more anxiety than those of its rivals. Its cars have fewer synthetic senses, lacking the radar and LiDAR sensors built into Waymos, Amazon’s Zoox vehicles, and other upcoming robotaxis. That design choice vastly lowers costs but leaves a Robotaxi without a fallback to the machine-vision software analyzing the car’s camera feeds.
And the crash data that Tesla, like other robotaxi operators, is required to provide to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration show that Robotaxis are not as safe as Waymos or even human-driven cars.
Tesla’s most recent NHTSA filing, published in February, shows a total of 15 Robotaxi crashes in Austin since last June, including four in January that did not involve any injuries. That adds up to one crash every 57,000 miles, Electrek estimated, almost four times the minor-collision crash rate for human drivers.
To see your surroundings as a Robotaxi sees them, focus on the dashboard touchscreen. (Rob Pegoraro)
Waymo’s rates are much better—an academic study calculated that its cars caused crashes resulting in any injury 80% less often than human drivers. But its vehicles have also committed some strange mistakes, including multiple cases of them driving past stopped school buses that had stop-sign arms extended and red lights flashing.
Other autonomous-vehicle operators filing NHTSA data are also far more transparent in the information they share, while Tesla continues redacting the entire “Narrative” field, which could provide useful context for each crash.
Instead of being able to get a sense of what happened—such as whether it was another vehicle’s fault—that field in NHTSA’s “ADS Incident Report Data” downloadable Excel spreadsheet just says “[REDACTED, MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION].”
Tesla did not respond to an email requesting comment, in keeping with the company’s longtime strategy of ignoring press inquiries.
This makes it harder for me to tell what sort of luck I had during my rides in Austin—and for Tesla owners considering a “Full Self-Driving” subscription to decide how much to trust that capability.
Tuesday provided another reminder of this technology’s possible failure modes: a first-person essay in The Atlantic by tech executive Raffi Krikorian, who ran Uber’s self-driving efforts from 2015 to 2017, recounting how his Tesla in FSD mode suddenly veered into a concrete wall last fall.
If any grownups at Tesla want to know why people might feel uneasy over their work to advance autonomous vehicle technology, they should take a look in the rearview mirror.
About Our Expert
Experience
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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