Idk if its just me but it seems the link to the article is not working, I believe this is the original https://fortune.com/2025/07/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-serv... . Honestly really excited in general for the expansion of driverless vehicle services like robotaxi/waymo, but I am a bit cautious on the robotaxi camera only approach (correct me if I’m wrong) compared to Waymo’s combination of LiDAR, radar and camera
I recall that Teslas have a mode where it shows its camera and labels what it sees. I would love to see what these failures look like in that mode. What did it think was there? Nothing at all? Something far away? Insect on the lens?
As a control engineer who knows something about sensor fusion - No LIDAR no ride. Musk can brute-force his unsafe robotaxis on the road but they won't be as safe as Waymo. Maybe people won't care if the price is slightly cheaper vs. competition, I don't know.
Having taken Waymo rides multiple times in San Francisco I can attest to how awesome Waymo is. I am worried Tesla will bring a bad name to the whole robotaxi industry. Waymo has never had an at-fault injury accident. Tesla FSD has killed many people.
“On Monday, Musk thought it would be funny to expand the area covered by its three-week-old Austin robotaxi service to resemble a giant penis when seen on a map.
“Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.”
It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.
Tesla Robotaxi is a classic case of premature optimisation - with Waymo they decided to deploy whatever technology worked best and did not cost-optimise at the start. Each Waymo vehicle is much more expensive than a Tesla, and has much more expensive sensors and compute.
Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.
There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
OT, but we need smart roads before we get a reliable robotaxi. You need lidar + road sensors embedded into the road. You basically have multiple sensors covering a section of the road that constantly updates specific to that section. And you have robotaxis pinging these stations wirelessly. When disconnected, autonomous feature also disengages. You don’t need to install a ton of sensors on every cars.
I recently ran across this weird world of the influencers who have been trotted out (invited) to post social media posts about their rides in the robotaxi. It is amazing how many are “other than the thing(s) that went wrong it was very safe and worked great”.
Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
Of course it can't scale. Putting 10000 cars with 1 human in them into a city is hard and just creates traffic. Putting 100 buses with 100 people in them is much easier.
Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway...
Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
I have the misfortune of living in this city and godforsaken state where they let any company with enough money use it as a testing ground.
Cruise was/is fucking awful. But these tesla taxis somehow 10x worse than Cruise. Going to end up live the governor of this state and without the ability to recover funds due to awful tort reform.
Tesla has to create new revenue sources. The Supercharger moat is evaporating. Elon is otherwise pretty successful in torching the brand loyalty. Regardless of one's personal opinion, Tesla owners as a whole are at odds with Elon politically. Tesla owners skewed educated, living in blue states and are environmentally conscious. I think this will go down as one of the biggest self-owns in history.
The only thing preventing Tesla from going bankrupt is trade barriers on Chinese EVs.
Elon has always been a snake oil salesman and I suspect this robotaxi venture will blow up in his face in a way that's potentially fatal for Tesla. All it will take is someone to be killed in or by a robotaxi. That'll bring in the authorities and likely reveal what a shitshow it is behind the scenes.
“The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.”
Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy.
Not just my opinion but proven over and over again.
Hiding safety data is just icing on a cake that he has been baking for years. The real problem here is that those who choose to trust him and his companies are putting others at risk.
Those who own/drive a Tesla typically have insurance but what about those who hire robotaxis? Can they be held personally liable when their roboride hurts someone?
I have a boss who speaks in "future tense" - they say how they think things WILL work. In my boss' case it's not lying, it's how their brain works. If you ask carefully, you can tell that they understand what's going on, but it takes some work to get there.
It's annoying, but not terrible in my case - it is good to have someone who can look towards the future.
I think people in general, and some people specifically, have hard time telling the difference between what IS true and what SHOULD Be true - especially when they are speaking informally.
I also think that billionaires are very hard to educate.
Anyway, you are absolutely correct, I also do not trust Musk.
Genuine questions for AI engineers, or self driving car people: is the Tesla approach of only using cameras inherently flawed? I've read that the AI is directly hooked up to the cameras, with no explicit intermediate 3D representation... everything is done in latent space. If true, this seems inherently hard to improve; throw more data at it, sure, but you can't necessarily understand how and why it fails when it does. That seems... non-optimal for safety-critical systems like self-driving cars.
Tesla's architecture is the only one of the robotaxi providers which actually _can_ scale. Not being dependent on exact HD maps, having the same standard as humans do "if you can see enough to drive" means eventually there'll be scant roads Robotaxi can't serve. By this strength it'll serve in areas that would never work for LIDAR/pre-HD-mapping requiring solutions
To be fair. I live at Mission Bay (SF) that has Caltrain railway nearby (and you have to cross it if you take particular ways in/out). I drive (and like it a lot!) Waymo. Waymo avoids crossing it (it takes a longer way to drive a bridge). So, they probably realized the risk and still to this are not willing taking it.
The whole article is based on an incident a YouTuber talks about in one of their videos. The incident was not captured on video and was not even described as dangerous by the YouTuber himself.
I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
36 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] thread“Harder, better, faster, stronger,” the $1 trillion company wrote on Monday, a double entendre referencing the synth pop track of the same name by Daft Punk, a duo appropriately known for performing as robots. Musk approvingly reposted the phallus-shaped service map, adding the fare would now be hiked to $6.90 per ride from $4.20 previously, both numbers the 54-year old often employs for comical effect.”
It’s amazing that anyone still takes him seriously. One of the first riders almost hit a train, and this is what he’s spending his time on. It’s inexcusable, but his fans lap it up.
The stan is strong, in that one...
Tesla on the other hand started with a load of constraints - smaller amounts of compute, cheaper sensors, needs to hit a price point as it will be installed in every vehicle sold - can't be $50,000 of dedicated self driving hardware per vehicle.
There are some scenarios where constraints lead to breakthroughs, but often for true-moonshot projects it is the opposite (see: Space shuttle, System/360, the manhattan project, LHC etc)
Some of those things that went wrong were dropping people off in the middle of an intersection, not recognizing railroad track guard rails… and simply not being able to get them to their destination at all.
Also why don't you use something what has less degrees of freedom like a train and thus is much easier to automate and also much easier to scale by just connecting more cars. You got that Loop thing, expand onto it and turn it into a subway...
Elon is trying to reinvent public transportation without a shred of understanding why did we get into current state - buses, subways, trams. There is natural development behind it, it is not like somebody said that city people shall only sit next to a stranger - you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that. Unless you will use existing mass transportation solutions.
Cruise was/is fucking awful. But these tesla taxis somehow 10x worse than Cruise. Going to end up live the governor of this state and without the ability to recover funds due to awful tort reform.
The only thing preventing Tesla from going bankrupt is trade barriers on Chinese EVs.
Elon has always been a snake oil salesman and I suspect this robotaxi venture will blow up in his face in a way that's potentially fatal for Tesla. All it will take is someone to be killed in or by a robotaxi. That'll bring in the authorities and likely reveal what a shitshow it is behind the scenes.
Anything Musk says is simply not trustworthy.
Not just my opinion but proven over and over again.
Hiding safety data is just icing on a cake that he has been baking for years. The real problem here is that those who choose to trust him and his companies are putting others at risk.
Those who own/drive a Tesla typically have insurance but what about those who hire robotaxis? Can they be held personally liable when their roboride hurts someone?
I have a boss who speaks in "future tense" - they say how they think things WILL work. In my boss' case it's not lying, it's how their brain works. If you ask carefully, you can tell that they understand what's going on, but it takes some work to get there.
It's annoying, but not terrible in my case - it is good to have someone who can look towards the future.
I think people in general, and some people specifically, have hard time telling the difference between what IS true and what SHOULD Be true - especially when they are speaking informally.
I also think that billionaires are very hard to educate.
Anyway, you are absolutely correct, I also do not trust Musk.
Tesla's architecture is the only one of the robotaxi providers which actually _can_ scale. Not being dependent on exact HD maps, having the same standard as humans do "if you can see enough to drive" means eventually there'll be scant roads Robotaxi can't serve. By this strength it'll serve in areas that would never work for LIDAR/pre-HD-mapping requiring solutions
I own a Tesla, I use FSD all the time. It is nowhere near viable enough yet to release it unsupervised to the masses with no driver at the wheel.
I have also ridden in Waymos and felt way more comfortable with how it drives. It's in a different league.
I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.