An awkward Tesla Robotaxi incident, where the “safety monitor” had to exit the vehicle in the middle of traffic to take the driver’s seat, suggests that Elon Musk’s company is prioritizing optics over safety.
At Electrek, we have warned all year that the launch of Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ is more about optics, giving the impression that Tesla is leading in autonomy, rather than advancements in deploying a safe autonomous ride-hailing system.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been making predictions about the automaker solving unsupervised self-driving by the end of every year for the last 6 years, and it never happened.
He and Tesla badly needed a win to save face as Waymo is now rapidly expanding its own autonomous ride-hailing service across half a dozen US cities.
To give the impression that it was also ready to deploy such a system, Tesla took a similar approach to selling self-driving technology in consumer vehicles – namely, doing it before it is ready.
Tesla began offering a ride-hailing service in Austin, utilizing vehicles equipped with an updated version of its consumer Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology. Instead of Tesla owners being supervisors and responsible for the cars like in the consumer version, Tesla installed employees in the front passenger seats with their fingers on a kill switch, ready to stop the car at any moment.
Moving the supervisor from the driver’s seat to the front passenger seat is purely for optics, to give the impression of progress, but it actually reduces safety.
In the driver’s seat, the supervisor would have more options to correct the vehicle in case of an error than with a killswitch to bring the vehicle to a stop.
Furthermore, a new incident also shows how Tesla’s approach endangers the “safety monitor.”
Tesla shareholders Ark Invest were testing Tesla Robotaxi when the vehicle wasn’t able to make a left turn and got stuck in traffic. The supervisor had to exit the vehicle in the middle of traffic to move to the driver’s seat and manually drive it to complete the ride:
As you can see from the video, they edited it so that you don’t know how long it took, and you don’t see the safety monitor navigating around traffic to move to the driver’s seat safely.
The video was produced as part of Ark Invest’s testing of Tesla Robotaxi.
Ark Invest is one of the biggest promoters of Tesla’s stock. They have consistently maintained the highest stock price target for Tesla on Wall Street: $2600 per share, which would make Tesla the most valuable company in the world.
It also happens to be one of the worst-performing funds of all time.
Its flagship ARK Innovation ETF is down more than 14% over the last 5 years, while the S&P 500 almost doubled during the same period:
Most of their Tesla valuation is also based on Robotaxi being a success.
Electrek’s Take
There’s absolutely no reason to move the supervisor from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat other than optics.
That’s it.
It would be safer for everyone involved if the supervisor was sitting in the front seat with their hands on the wheel, but simply because Texas law allows Tesla to do it, they are moving it to the passenger seat with a finger on a kill switch because it looks better in videos produced almost by Tesla shareholders, which are almsot exclusively the ones with access to the service.
In California, Tesla is not allowed to do that so its “Robotaxi” service in the Bay Area is literally Supervised FSD with a Tesla driver in the driver’s seat.
To be clear, the Robotaxi in Austin is virtually the same thing, but the supervisor is in the passenger seat.
It makes no sense. Safety before optics.
Anyway, I don’t understand who Tesla is trying to convince here. Only its shareholders base believe that it is ahead of Waymo. Anyone who is unbiased here can see through Tesla’s game of smoke and mirrors.
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