Robotaxi image by: @artsimage
This post is syndicated from EVWire, where guest contributor Jaan Juurikas writes about EVs.
On Sunday, June 22nd, Tesla launched its robotaxis in Austin, Texas, using Unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) in their Model Ys. Initial rollout was done with invite-only access, ~20mi2 geofenced area, and a supervisor in the passenger seat (nobody in drivers’). Below I’ll share with you the whole experience, good and bad, and all the geeky little details.
We’ll start with the core details:
11+ robotaxis have so far been confirmed to be offering rides in Austin, all New Model Ys. Elon has said before he believes they’ll reach a thousand in a few months.
Invite-only: select Tesla influencers and stakeholders got invites to the Early Access program, no traditional media involved.
In fact, the media outlets like Reuters were running circles around the early access folks trying to get comments — and they got shut down bad by everyone. Such a win in my eyes!
PS, I might have a way to get you an early invite or at least increase your chances, find it in the end of this section.A safety monitor sits in the passenger seat and can stop the ride at any moment (and with remote assistance fallbacks that can take over). We know it’s one of the Austin city’s requirements at first deployment anyway, not sure how long we’ll see them there.
Geofenced area of South Austin, of around 15-20mi2. Here’s the comparison of Tesla’s service area (red) vs the Waymo service area in Austin (blue):
Keep in mind, this is quite temporary though, and we know Tesla is expanding further in Austin Metro soon enough, beyond just Austin City limits like Waymo’s permit.The service is paused whenever severe weather happens (Waymos also usually pull to a parking lot in such occasions btw);
No info on when Cybercabs are added yet;
Tesla charges a $4.20 fixed fee (true to their humor).
Now, let’s go through the experience here. Here is what the app looks like when you start to order your robotaxi (notice the cybercab-gold theme there):
Here is an overview video of the robotaxi app from Rob Maurer:
Now, your robotaxi is about to arrive. The app will show you the ETA also as an iOS live activity if you got an iPhone:
Image: @SawyerMerritt
Your app also said the car will pulse its exterior lights for you when it arrives. I’ve also heard there’s a button somewhere to make the car… whistle?
Oh look, here it is! By the way, Tesla launched these vehicles in all different colors, nothing specific chosen it seems.
Image: @AdanGuajardo
Alright, you sit in the back — greet the safety operator on the passenger seat — and you hit Start Ride from either your phone or the rear screen. You’ll also notice, that your cloud profile syncs over, so Spotify and other logins are there as a passenger immediately; and the climate control preferences as well. Also, Tesla’s Robotaxi will automatically log out of all your apps when you exit the vehicle to maintain privacy.
Riders have already noted that the song that was paused from the previous ride will just start playing where it left off from in your next ride. Of course, there’s the usual — games, youtube, streaming etc options. You can also call support from that screen.
Here’s a video of the rear screen user interface:
Okay, so you go through your ride, likely a boring ride without any hiccups (rare), maybe you happen to go through some situations that make you go a little ‘wow’ like your robotaxi avoiding running over a peacock, or pulling over for an ambulance.
You also noticed that the windshield wipers act weird sometimes. The windshield wipers are set to run a different sequence just to clean the camera.
Whatever, you’re at your destination.
Your app now asks you if you want to leave a tip.
And if you feel generous and really click to leave a tip to a robotaxi?
Well…
…you’ll just see this fellow pop up:
You exit the vehicle and go about your day.
Now, if you want to see the POV videos from a lot of Early Access riders, here is a thread with a lot of videos from the rides here, with the robotaxi going through all kinds of situations. By the way, if you’re on X, do follow the new @robotaxi account from Tesla too.
Watch tip: Here’s Dave Lee taking 5 Tesla Robotaxi, 4 Waymo, and 1 Uber ride, a 39-minute video.
Some Tesla geeks like DirtyTesla here have already done 50 rides with the Tesla robotaxi already. He says he had 0 interventions, not counting one after he exited the robotaxi and the driver did something himself.
Now, although there has been no accidents so far over the four days since rollout, I do want to point out some incidents, which the large legacy media is also fixated on:
Robotaxi drives into oncoming lane after some glitch in navigating, then self-corrects.
Robotaxi seemingly not detecting UPS driver suddenly stopping and reversing and the safety operator had to press “stop in lane” so the car wouldn’t continue. Here, however, the robotaxi does back out when blocked by UPS.
Rider presses "pull over", Robotaxi stops in an intersection when waiting behind traffic, not in the middle but also not quite clear.
A few other less critical incidents like driving over a curb and going slightly over the speed limit.
Honestly, doesn’t look like anything the software couldn’t fix in a brief while. Overall, I think Tesla has proven you can indeed run a successful and safe robotaxi operation operating vision-only with cameras and an end-to-end neural network.
Thinking you’d want to be that guy in the robotaxi while you monitor and it drives you around Austin all day? Turns out you can… and get paid for it:
Now, we also saw a little behind-the-scenes glimpse of it all. Here’s the Robotaxi launch party shared by Ashok Elluswamy, which seems to be some kind of a robotaxi ops HQ at Tesla. The picture is taken 13 minutes after launch and shows 112 rides done with 499 miles total. You can see the team monitoring videos, weather and more.
Then there was this pic from Srihari, another Tesla AI team member:
By the way.. did you notice it?
No, I don’t mean the weirdly tall guy in the back.
It’s okay if you didn’t… I did.
You can see a workstation with a steering wheel behind the guy on the left, which is very likely one of those solutions for when a Tesla remote operator needs to take over the robotaxi should you find yourself in a pickle somewhere:
Okay, enough with the geeky stuff.
This post from James Douma (worth a follow btw) sums the whole launch up nicely:
New patches of invites are going out for those that wanted Early Access (which I assume is tens of thousands of people). We’ll get more rides, more videos, more edge cases and hopefully it’ll all go smoothly. I do think Tesla has also some hidden embedded wins through using its own vehicles in the robotaxi service, consider this:
With the Technoking of Tesla also owning one of the largest social apps, one of the largest AI chat apps and overall attention in the world, I would rather confidently argue that Tesla will not have a demand problem for its robotaxi service for any market it enters through its full scale-up of the service. The demand levers it can pull…
