Tesla’s Robotaxi service, which launched in Austin, Texas less than a week ago, has seen its vehicles involved in so many dodgy situations that Redditors put together a list of all the incidents.
The list (via The Verge) currently consists of 11 videos of Tesla’s Robotaxis making fairly obvious errors such as driving in the wrong lane, running over curbs, and stopping in the middle of the road for no good reason.
It’s not a great look for the service which has been running less than a week, with only 10 to 20 Tesla Model Y cars, and only in a limited area in South Austin.
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Videos show Tesla robotaxis appearing to violate traffic laws in Austin
The list has mostly been put together by folks riding in Tesla’s Robotaxi cars, and it keeps increasing. Some incidents can be explained by legitimate causes, such as a video of a Robotaxi Tesla braking unexpectedly, which might have been caused by sudden sunlight (though this, again, raises the question of the validity of Tesla’s vision-only approach to self-driving, as opposed to using additional sensors such as LiDARs). Some, like another video of a Tesla appearing to run over a curb, seem like plain Robotaxi errors.
It’s worth noting that many Robotaxi users described their experience as smooth and comfortable. The service is currently open to the “Early Access” group, which mostly consists of Tesla enthusiasts and influencers. Also, while some of the videos above are worrying, Tesla’s Robotaxis don’t appear to have been involved in any accidents so far.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk hopes to expand the Robotaxi service over the next months, with “millions” of cars expected to be in operation next year, and the aim of people being able to send their Teslas to work as Robotaxis. It’s unclear, however, why the service would see such a quick progress, given that Musk has been promising radical improvements to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech (the assistance suite that allows for partially autonomous driving), which keep being postponed.
