Tesla puts foot in its mouth: ‘unsupervised self-driving is not solved’, but what about robotaxi?

Tesla has put its foot in its mouth regarding its self-driving efforts during its quarterly conference call last night. The automaker admitted that ‘unsupervised self-driving is not solved’ on its HW4, despite Tesla highlighting how its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas is using HW4.

For a year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been hyping the launch of an “unsupervised robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, in June.

Despite Musk’s claim of an unsupervised service, we noted that the robotaxi service Tesla launched in June has a supervisor on the front passenger seat with a finger on a kill switch, allowing them to stop the vehicle at all times.

By definition, that’s not “unsupervised,” but Musk has used the service to build confidence with customers, whom he promised unsupervised self-driving for years without ever delivering.

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He has consistently emphasized that the Robotaxis in Austin are using the same hardware as the vehicles Tesla delivers to customers.

Musk again repeated the claim last night during Tesla’s earnings call. He said Tesla uses “the same hardware in the Austin Robotaxi vehicles as those in customer vehicles.” He was referring to hardware 4 (HW4).

However, shortly after he made the comment, Tesla’s head of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, admitted that Tesla hasn’t solved unsupervised self-driving on HW4.

When asked when Tesla plans to retrofit HW3 cars, Elluswamy said that it will only happen when they solve unsupervised self-driving on HW4 cars:

What we want to do is get unsupervised done on hardware 4 first. Once it’s done, then we’ll go back and look at what we need to do with the hardware 3 cars. Like I said, the focus is first to get unsupervised out and then we’ll go back and see what more work we need to do.

Again, Musk has previously claimed that Tesla solved unsupervised on HW4 with Robotaxi in Austin.

Now, it is leaving HW3 owners in limbo as they need to wait for Tesla to solve unsupervised self-driving on HW4 cars, for real this time, and there’s no clear evidence that it can achieve this.

Electrek’s Take

The whole thing is such a joke. Musk is on the record claiming that Tesla’s Robotaxi service in Austin would be unsupervised in June. It wasn’t and still isn’t. It’s basically Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ in customer vehicles, but with the supervising driver being shifted from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat.

Now, Ashok at least admits that unsupervised is not solved.

Musk claims that it will be available in customer vehicles by the end of the year in “some geographical areas”, but the truth is that it still can’t do so in Austin with its Robotaxi, and he has made the exact same claim every year for the last six years.

Now, the question becomes: when does Tesla admit it can’t achieve unsupervised self-driving on HW4 cars?

That’s what HW3 owners, some of whom purchased cars back in 2016, have to wait for.

I’ve never been more convinced that this will end in courtrooms.