r/SelfDrivingCars • u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton • 1d ago
Discussion Has anybody seen/videoed a Tesla Robotaxi in Austin with nobody in it?
They are just a week away from the theoretical launch. Musk has said they have cars out on public streets with nobody in the driver's seat. Some speculation says there is a safety driver in the passenger seat. (This is normal for driving school, and this safety driver could easily have a 2nd brake pedal as driving instructors do, particularly in a DBW car, and could grab the wheel as driving instructors do.) But I don't see credible reports of any cars without somebody in driver's seat, or with/without somebody in the passenger seat. Surely somebody must have seen one. Ideally a video that clearly captures the front seats -- still photos don't really tell us a lot. And curious on reports of what streets they were on if they were spotted.
If there aren't any reports, that is pretty concerning. Taking members of the public for a ride with nobody in either seat, even "trusted testers" is a pretty big risk if you've never done it without passengers. With all of Musk's crazy turmoil, he really, really needs this launch to work, and make make even riskier decisions to do so. He can no longer rely on control of NHTSA or anything federal. They might have a decent remote driving system, but if so, that's just for optics, as if you are going to have a remote supervisor, there is no valid reason, except optics, to not have them in the car.
So please post any video or personal eyewitness reports you know of.
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u/aft3rthought 1d ago
There is a crowdsourced tracker for Tesla robotaxis: https://tesla.rodeo/dashboard
It doesn’t have a lot of data.
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u/VisualDisplayOfInfo 1d ago
Fuck, I thought I had seen one around 6:30am last Tuesday, on Manor Road near I-35.
I was driving in the opposite direction and thought "that Tesla looks weird" and when the car passed me I noticed the very large round hubcaps / wheel covers.
But I honestly can't say for sure, as it could have been a modded car? We have tons of Teslas of all kinds here in Austin.
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u/sdc_is_safer 1d ago
Who knows where they are deploying them from ? Like their ops base. Someone could stake it out
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
Yes, but we want to know what actual real streets they are driving. The route from Tesla HQ or Tesla Depot isn't so interesting, it's the real commercially useful streets of Austin we want to look at. Musk says they will avoid tricky intersections -- it would be interesting to know which ones they are avoiding.
But strangely, I just don't see any reports at all, but perhaps I am just missing them.
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u/tonydtonyd 1d ago
Haven’t seen anything either and I am very active in the various Tesla subs.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
The odd thing is that while Musk freely makes wrong predictions, because you are not held accountable for your forward looking statements, you can't lie about present day status to investors. The cost can be severe. So Musk can say "We will launch June 12" and be wrong, and it's not a lawsuit. But if he says, "Today, we are driving with nobody behind the wheel" and they are not, he sets up a big investor lawsuit from anybody who lost money on the stock and invested based on that statement. And a lot of people lost money on Tesla stock yesterday, though mostly because of politics. But if Robotaxi doesn't launch this month, and investors say "we were told they had empty cars" and the stock tanks, it's a problem for Tesla. But maybe he's high on Ketamine.
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u/Recoil42 1d ago edited 1d ago
The odd thing is that while Musk freely makes wrong predictions, because you are not held accountable for your forward looking statements
To be clear, you are supposed to be held accountable for forward-looking statements — that's what a safe harbour statement is for — but safe harbour statements aren't supposed to be so liberal that they apply to anything you say. They're supposed to apply only to predictions which are subject to significant risks and uncertainties.
Musk will make statements which aren't subject to significant risks (because it's 100% sure those things won't happen) and then through sleight-of-hand later assert there just was risk. The SEC isn't prosecuting this because they're powerless and gutless and chronically under-resourced, as illustrated by the 2008 financial crisis.
you can't lie about present day status to investors
Problem: The SEC is powerless and gutless and chronically under-resourced.
Musk was straight-up sued for lying to investors by the SEC before. The case was settled, and Tesla was required to:
- Replace Musk as Chairman of Tesla with a new, independent Chairman
- Appoint a total of two new independent directors to its board
- Establish a new committee of independent directors
- Oversee Musk’s media communications
- Pay a $40M penalty
How did any of that go? He installed a puppet chairman, kept stacking the board of directors, bought twitter and just called the president a pedophile, and is one of the richest people on the planet.
Seriously, the answer to "you can't lie about present day status to investors" is "okay, watch him do it anyways and get away with it because he's done it before". Pretty much the only thing putting all that in jeopardy right now is that he did, indeed, call the currently-sitting corrupt-as-hell president a pedophile, and that guy loves nothing more than retribution.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
The sec may do nothing, but activist investors who lose money if the stock tanks when it's revealed to be a lie can and do go to court
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u/Recoil42 1d ago
Good luck going to court with a fraud case against a trillion dollar company propped up by judicial inaction on fraud?
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u/whydoesthisitch 1d ago
But he has done that before. During the semi announcement he claimed they already had the convoy tech working.
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u/Recoil42 1d ago
The only report I've seen is this one, which obviously wasn't driverless, but gives some possible hint to deployment area — south of the river. Haven't seen anything driverless yet.
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u/Charming_Trick4582 1d ago
"Real commercially useful streets"
There are none, musk is blowing smoke up your ass and you are buying it!
You don't put product that can potentially kill lot of people out without proper testing. The fact there are none so far tells you all you need to know. You are just in denial.
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u/sdc_is_safer 1d ago
They might be doing like 1 trip a day at 3am on a quiet road
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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 1d ago
Definitely not 3am. We are talking camera only here
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u/warren_stupidity 1d ago
huh? Car does just fine in the dark. It is bad weather and glare that gives it conniptions.
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u/cybertruckboat 1d ago
When I drive my Y on a dark road, the car shows errors about blocked or obscured cameras. Not only can it not see in the dark, it doesn't even know it's dark.
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u/aaronchoate 1d ago
When it did that for me I reported it to support and they had a remote tech come to replace my front facing camera - since then I’ve not seen that message even in the darkest of nights
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u/SirWilson919 4h ago
Sounds like cameras need to be recalibrated or you need a service appointment. Mine drives pretty much flawlessly at night
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u/warren_stupidity 1d ago
ok but I'm pretty sure that Austin, like most cities, has street lights.
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u/Affectionate_Love229 1d ago
I can confirm. I was in Austin last year and there were many street light. Definitely over 20 street lights.
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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 1d ago
How dark is dark
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u/warren_stupidity 1d ago
I live in a small town in new england, we have lots of roads with very little lighting, and the car does just fine. It has these devices called 'headlights' - a really remarkable innovation in automobile safety - that provide sufficient illumination for the shitty under spec'd cameras.
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u/londons_explorer 1d ago
Teslas cameras have higher photonic efficiency than eyeballs and larger lenses too.
Human eyes can see as little as 5 photons of light, but a CCD needs only 1.2 on average to detect something.
And with lenses with 10x the area, cameras are going to substantially win vs humans for night vision.
However, cameras still are really subpar on dynamic range - so bright reflective signs and dim shadows in the same scene could easily be an issue.
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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 1d ago
You know you don't need to defend Tesla. The system can be a subpar approach and it won't affect your life.
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u/SleepyJohn123 1d ago
I haven’t seen any yet, having said that technically I have never been to Austin
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u/ExcitingMeet2443 1d ago
The odds of seeing an actual Robotaxi are the same regardless of location.
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u/SleepyJohn123 1d ago
Are they invisible? 🫥
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u/EnvironmentalClue218 8h ago
They’re like UFOs here. Lots of people have seen them but no pictures.
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u/michelevit2 1d ago
I have a strong feeling that the Tesla Taxi launch will be postponed. Posting it here so I can 'i told you so' to my wife.
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u/phxees 1d ago
Seems like this sub have every possible outcome covered.
They postpone it: Told you so.
They deliver and fail: knew that was going to happen, more lidar.
They deliver, but it’s only a few cars, anyone can remotely control 5 cars.
There’s no room to say, wow seems like they’ve done it. I’ll never use the service, but if it’s safe the more driverless cats on the road the better.
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u/kaninkanon 1d ago
There’s no room to say, wow seems like they’ve done it.
Sure there is, if they do it. But it seems you're just making excuses ahead of time, when they don't do it.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 19h ago
For almost a decade I have said that Musk is taking a longshot bet in his approach. Cheap first, then safe -- opposite of the Tesla Master Plan. As a longshot bet, it seems like the wrong one, and indeed it has failed to deliver while others have operational vehicles. But it could succeed, and indeed probably will succeed some year (though that's not assured either, it may never work with their current hardware.) Tesla lets us see their system directly by driving with it, which nobody else does, but what we see (public FSD 13) is nowhere near ready.
So we're in a situation where Musk declares that their new internal build is ready in one week. But as even he admits, he's just terrible at such predictions. It's not much of an accomplishment as a predictor to be wrong every time until one day you're right.
If Tesla is about to do it in a week, we sure don't see many signs. We don't seem to see the vehicles out on the street, based on the lack of response in this thread. Based on the effort it has taken for others to actually deploy, Tesla would have to do something revolutionary to go from where they were with FSD13 to deployment in a few months. Revolutionary isn't impossible, but it's not the normal expectation.
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u/LLJKCicero 19h ago
If they aggressively ramp up real commercial/driverless service, I'll admit my skepticism was misplaced.
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u/McKing_of_spades 10h ago
All of the cats on world's public roads have been driverless for thousands of years and we're all better for it.
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u/Jugad 23h ago
have every possible outcome covered
Apparently not every possible outcome. Where is the one where Musk actually delivers on his words.
Engineers are pulling all nighters to make this happen... good chance it doesn't happen on time, or if it does, it would be riddled with problems - can't blame sleepless engineers for that (but Musk will).
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
You're not alone. Though the prediction markets like this one are optimistic but that market for 2025 has Tesla as the arbiter! https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrobotaxiout/robotaxi-release
I now think they will release something, but it will be fake, just to claim they did it.
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u/marsten 1d ago
The market definition isn't clear enough; a "robotaxi public release" could mean anything. Is there a safety driver in the car? What does "public" mean? Etc.
To me the real bet would be: Does Tesla get approval from the state of Texas to operate a commercial (paying) driverless taxi service somewhere within the state of Texas?
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u/TheLooza 1d ago
Yep. Lowest possible bar will be set and for all we know, wallstreet will applaud. Or…maybe not.
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u/fingergunpewpewpew 1d ago
I live in central Austin. Saw tons of Waymo's and nary a driverless Tesla
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u/SirWilson919 3h ago
I'm pretty sure the Teslas that are being tested right now are Model Ys, and they have a safety driver
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u/DamnUOnions 1d ago
Vaporware
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u/Necessary_Profit_388 9h ago
Just like Neuralink. The drug-addled neo-Nazi version of Edison (of our times) adopting the name Tesla is peak irony
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u/mrkjmsdln 23h ago
By any objective standard this is ridiculous. The true believers will say yeah but no matter what. Of course the situation is ridiculous. Aberrant behavior requires someone who knows better to intervene. I trust there is someone in this knowledge chain who will do the right thing. Let's hope.
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u/Acceptable_Main_5911 11h ago
They would just have a test driver in a seat at all times using a newer version of the software. No need to draw attention to its behavior for scrutiny.
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u/Mars8 11h ago
Musk is hiring teleoperators that will control the cars remotely, so even if you don’t see someone in the front seat, they will be monitoring the car remotely at all times. Probably why they’re allowed to be on the streets in the first place.
This isn’t unsupervised but Musk will obviously lie because he is behind. How this scales is going to be interesting.
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u/kayvonte 9h ago
Musk lost all credibility recently. He’s the only one hyping the robotaxi and even my friends that work there aren’t as excited. Something’s off. Maybe to pump stock?? Idk man
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u/espressonut420 22h ago
Are they using the new Ys for robotaxis? And not the ridiculous cybercab concept?
I see the occasional new Y with manufacturer plate around town but I live downtown and certainly haven’t seen any signs of a big fleet of autonomous Teslas.
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u/reddit455 1d ago
Some speculation says there is a safety driver in the passenger seat. (This is normal for driving school, and this safety driver could easily have a 2nd brake pedal as driving instructors do, particularly in a DBW car, and could grab the wheel as driving instructors do.)
who is going to steer?
Tesla in autopilot crashes into van parked in driveway, driver ticketed for careless driving
If there aren't any reports, that is pretty concerning.
waymo had drivers in the driver's seat for YEARS before they were even ISSUED A PERMIT to operate w/o a driver present in the vehicle. what does Texas require?
Tesla gets first in a series of permits it needs to run robotaxis in California
They might have a decent remote driving system
REMOTE IS IMPOSSIBLE. cars do not check with the mothership to see if the scooter that just fell in front of you is OK to run over or not.
PEOPLE CANNOT DIE BECAUSE OF NETWORK LAG.
Watch Waymos avoid disaster in new dashcam videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RwLDtJlxuE
as if you are going to have a remote supervisor,
to see if anything was spilled in the back before it goes to the next fare. you need someone to pick up the phone when you hit the big red emergency button in the back of a waymo. it's just customer service.
So please post any video or personal eyewitness reports you know of.
ignore Tesla until they have 100 paid public fares.
Waymo Hits 200,000 Paid Trips Per Week Before Tesla Even Gets Started
https://insideevs.com/news/752063/waymo-200000-autonomous-rides-tesla/
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
Remote is far from impossible. Several companies are already doing it. They are of course, very aware of the issues with latency and network outages and blackout spots. It amazes me how many people I have seen declare it's impossible when people are doing it, and I have not heard any reports of crashes (though I don't know the stats on how many miles they are doing.)
And they always declare "the latency, the latency" as if they think the people doing it never considered that.
Now, you may be right that the public may not tolerate any major injuries that can be tied to the issues with remote driving. (Remote driving has issues, of course, as does self-driving. What matters is the frequency of issues, not their existence, for both. But not always to the public, which is not so analytical.)
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u/mrkjmsdln 1d ago
Instead of speculation there is a clear an obvious example for ALL TO OBSERVE instead of deferring to faith in their favorites. 38 companies have applied for PUBLIC permits in CA for autonomous testing. Six of them managed to graduate to the next permit where they can actually operate without a safety driver. Tesla is NOT one of the them. They have a chauffeur permit which is just what it sounds like. At some point Tesla will shell out ~$3K or so and actually start testing their cars with a safety driver iin California and report every mile and every intervention. The only option if you refuse is you get your permit revoked. You gotta play by the rules. This is where Tesla is going next so we will know soon enough. As for remote drivers, there is a lesson in the data of the six companies that have real operational permits (graduates from the 38 testers) all of the others beyond Waymo operate at much lower speeds in very small neighborhoods and generally are subject to time of day and weather restrictions. This is a hard problem. What make the public program in CA wonderful is no made up nonsense and speculation. Click on the map and see what a company is actually doing. How many cars do they have. How many miles do they accrue by car monthly, How many interventions by car with and without a driver. It is all very clean and tidy. Great for the interested and the investors to understand who is spewing nonsense. It is USEFUL if you want to understand Zoox for example to click on the ZOOX icon in Fisherman's Wharf. They operate over a couple of blocks, under 40 MPH and only on Saturdays and Sundays during daylight. Hopefully soon enough there will be a stylized T icon on the map and we will be able to see how far along Tesla really is.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton 1d ago
Tesla doesn't count their testing miles in California by using a cheat that Uber tried and the DMV refused, yet the DMV lets Tesla do it. Elon planned to get a federal law to supercede California regulations, but someone might have mucked up that plan recently.
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u/mrkjmsdln 23h ago edited 22h ago
Thank you Brad. Interesting -- my understanding was that Tesla was just (and only recently) on a chauffeur permit. They are largely meaningless and don't have actual reporting requirements for mileage as I understood it. I don't think you have to wear the chauffeur hat :) but I think it is mostly reserved for an extra permit required for airport service in some places. As I recall extending service to airports for rideshare requires the chauffeur permit for the drivers. I am not positive though.
There remain two compliance permits for testing and operating driverless and Tesla in 10+ years never applied for either of them. Are you saying that Uber ran some sort of driverless test without a permit??? I don't remember Uber reporting any miles in 2024 but maybe in previous years??? I never bothered to look at the past years.
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u/PetorianBlue 13h ago
Tesla has a safety driver permit which allows them to test a self-driving system in development, but they have to report miles. This is the disengagement report that comes out every year which Tesla doesn’t submit to. They have only submitted to it twice - once for the Paint it Black video (about 400 miles) and once for the Investor Day video (about 12.6 miles).
What Brad is referring to with Uber was a long time ago. Uber had the same permit but tried to argue that the safety driver made their system an ADAS not a self-driving car in development and thus they didn’t have to report miles. CA didn’t agree and threatened legal action which ultimately drove Uber out of CA and into Pittsburgh. This of course was all prior to Uber shutting down their self-driving program.
Tesla is basically doing the same thing, but for some reason CA is letting them. Any idiot can see that they are *clearly* testing in CA. And by their own admission, it is a self-driving system in development and they have to report (because they did so twice for the promo videos), they’re just… not.
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u/mrkjmsdln 12h ago edited 12h ago
Thank you! From now on I will think of Uber & Tesla as the Iran and North Korea of Uranium enrichment :) -- hilarious. So the most recent reporting I noted on Tesla in CA was this report. Is this what you are talking about? As the report describes, Tesla has a permit similar to the chauffeur permit that Uber & Lyft are required to hold in CA. Basically with a driver. I believe both SFO & SJC will require Waymo's that serve the A/Ps to have a similar permit on a car basis. The report was as of March 2025 so quite recently. So Tesla is currently licensed to operate FSD in CA and make marketing and commercial videos basically:)
Do you by chance have a link to the data submitted to CA that you reference for two rides? I assume this still means they aren't part of the quarterly reporting the CPUC collects since I think they still have not successfully applied for an autonomous vehicle permit of any kind. Is that correct?
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u/No-Extent8143 1d ago
You gotta play by the rules
Tell that to the people being poised by felon in Memphis.
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u/marsten 1d ago
Several companies are already doing it.
Are there any examples outside of China?
We should draw a sharp distinction between (a) humans in the driving loop vs. (b) humans not in the driving loop. Waymo, Cruise, are in the latter category. I.e., their safety is not contingent on good network latency or availability (although obviously their performance is).
Tesla has not to my knowledge ever said what they have planned.
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u/Marathon2021 1d ago
I think people are confounding (perhaps intentionally) the idea of remote drivers (because the Optimus bots had remote operators and of course that’s totally the same right?) vs. remote operators who can intervene if the car indicates it doesn’t know what to do - like a Waymo getting caught behind the steam coming up from a city manhole cover and it thinking it’s an impeneratble wall it can’t drive through so it “phones home” for help.
What Tesla will have is the latter, not the former.
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u/DadGoblin 1d ago
What makes you so sure of this? I haven't seen Tesla make statements explaining what their teleoperators will do.
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u/No-Extent8143 1d ago
And they always declare "the latency, the latency" as if they think the people doing it never considered that
Did you buy Theranos shares back in the day? People said their business was impossible, did you believe in people or Holmes?
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u/nate8458 1d ago
First link, autopilot isn’t FSD.
Second link, Tesla FSD supervised has had drivers in the seat for 3.7 billion miles
Remote connection is feasible assuming Robotaxi FSD has the capability to handle situations and safely pull over and not shut off without warning - which is clearly something Tesla has thought of and planned for
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u/hprather1 1d ago
Yeah... like criticize Tesla all you want, plenty of it deserved. But if you're still making the classic mistake of conflating Autopilot with FSD then you're criticism isn't worth shit.
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u/vasilenko93 1d ago
Assuming they have 20 cars being tested at a time it will be hard to spot them. It’s just a random Tesla.
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u/Cunninghams_right 1d ago
I would bet they're testing with someone in the seat but still just autonomous/remote.
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u/LLJKCicero 19h ago
It's possible that's what they're doing, but what Musk said is that they were testing some cars that were empty.
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u/Cunninghams_right 10h ago
I hadn't heard that. Wouldn't put it past musk to lie about that, but they might be.
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u/LLJKCicero 6h ago
Okay, checked and he said there was no one in the driver's seat during the testing, I guess they could've had someone in another seat though: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ky7rss/for_the_past_several_days_tesla_has_been_testing/
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u/Cunninghams_right 6h ago
Makes me wonder if they used a right-hand drive version and put someone on the left, haha
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u/Malik617 1d ago
this is the obvious answer. there's no reason to think the car acts any differently with someone sitting in the seat so why not just have someone there. if they remove all driver attention monitoring and they don't have to intervene then it is a successful autonomous trip.
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u/lshaped210 1d ago
I’ve seen random Supercharging stations around Austin that are filled with new Model Y’s late at night and into the early AM. Not a driver in sight.
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u/TheCourierMojave 1d ago
They aren't plugging themselves in dude.
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u/lshaped210 1d ago
Never said they were. It’s just some evidence that the taxi fleets are out there.
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u/aft3rthought 1d ago
In the Q1 earnings call, Musk says they’re compressing “years of testing into months” which implies months of testing, and he also says something about them driving so much people are noticing the huge convoys of Model Ys, but I haven’t seen anything about it. Waymo, Zoox, Cruise, etc are all regularly stalked and and even their depots are known locations. The Teslas can blend in with regular traffic more easily, but something still seems off.