54
votes
Tesla 'Robotaxi' status check eight months in: a complete joke
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- Title
- Tesla 'Robotaxi' status check: 8 months in, 19% availability, and all of Musk's promises are missing
- Authors
- Fred Lambert, Micah Toll, Jo Borrás, Michelle Lewis
- Published
- Feb 16 2026
- Word count
- 1370 words
As a palate cleanser, I encourage reading this essay, "The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology".
Feels kinda gross calling "CEO said a thing!" journalism, when it's just propaganda, capitalism's "Leader Says ---" to the communist Quotations From Mao or Xi Thoughts
It makes much more sense if we stop wondering about why its news worth reporting, and just accept that because our society is bought by billionaire and they want us to personality worship them.
I saw some discussion lately about "why did Bezos buy the Washington Post", and why did he pretty much destroy it. And of course the answer is that when you have unlimited money you do stupid capricious shit and also when you buy the media you can have stories like "CEO said a thing!" and suppress stories about how Trump is way worse mentally than Biden was, while also a corrupt criminal.
There are hundreds of billionaires. I highly doubt anyone here can name more than 20 off the top of their head. Ultimately, the ones you're thinking of are celebrities first and foremost. Being interviewed by the media is simply what they do.
I'm glad it's a joke, otherwise it's a death trap.
A safety monitor here is a human whose sole job is to monitor the vehicle and take over when the robot fails, not an electric sensor kind of monitor. (Source link from inside link)
These are extremely serious incidents they're not being transparent about, and that's with a dude in the car.
Lemme preface this by stating that Tesla is slimy, Musk is a monster, and there are fundamental problems with self-driving tech and policy we don't have solutions for. This is not advocating for the devil; I'm trying to strengthen the offensive against him.
This comparison isn't apples-to-apples; human drivers have loads of minor collisions they don't report to the police (or any other authority, e.g. their insurance company). I'd assume animal collisions almost never result in a police report (I've certainly never heard of someone alerting the police that they ran over a deer). In my 50-100k miles of lifetime driving, I've had two vehicle-vehicle contacts, neither of which resulted in a police report. (Obviously, both were minor enough not to require any repair of either vehicle, and lest you consider me reckless, neither was my fault. One did result in an insurance claim.)
AFAICT we don't have a rigorous metric we can use here (and, of course, we don't know what Tesla isn't reporting to the NHTSA). I'd assume insurance claims would be at least more comprehensive; attempting to cobble together stats from a few different sources suggests roughly one collision insurance claim per 50k miles driven, though of course a significant portion of those will be for minor collisions with no injuries or functional damage to any property.
In any case, whether Tesla's automated accident rate is on par with or much worse than that of human drivers, it immediately makes two very strong points against them:
Yup, to your second point, there isn't enough information they're given out on what exactly happened and how serious or minor these incidents are. People in their cars, sharing the road, or just outside a concrete building should not be subject to their human testing with results hidden
I heard recently that police were still working out how to interact with driverless cars (Waymo and robotaxi). If it gets a ticket, who pays it? If someone dies, who’s responsible?
Surely the company, no? The backseat passenger clearly can't be responsible.
Yes. But who at the company? And what do the police do if the infraction should cause a license revocation?
Every driverless car company has to get individual permission from the local DMV to have driverless cars. When accidents happened, they are reported and reviewed by the DMV. If the accident is serious enough, then the DMV can revoke the permit to have driverless cars operate.
This happened with Cruise in SF, for instance.
I'm so glad I escaped the mind virus. I was a hardcore Tesla fanboy. I believed all the lies from Elon and even worked for Tesla at one point. It's amazing they still work on people with the years of evidence we now have for them.
Same. I dropped off somewhere around the time those kids got trapped in a cave and musk called one of the divers a "pedo guy". It's served me well as a good "don't forget to check your biases" reminder whenever I start liking some person/business/idea/whatever.
Can stockholders file a class action? Doesn't seem like the federal government would step in if they lied about numbers
I am not at all surprised that they are light-years away from Elon's promises, I stopped listening to what he had to promise years ago. I am surprised that the service has such an abysmal crash rate. From friends who have Tesla Model 3s and use Autopilot (or FSD? Not entirely sure which is which), they mention that they rely heavily on it and that 80+% of their driving is done by the car itself. It does freak me out a bit to share the road with people who are so disconnected from driving but this is what we get by not investing in public transit as much.
I'm one of those people. Model 3 with just basic Autopilot. It has taken care of 90% of my commute for the last 5 years with almost no issues, and no issues at all for multiple years (the early years had serious 'phantom braking' problems). I trust it almost completely now, but my route is the same every day and I know exactly how the car will handle each situation. It took awhile to build that confidence so I could relax more but the Autopilot technology (especially when it used Radar, which my car still does (I refuse to install the update that removes the radar and switches to 'Vision Only'). It does great even in heavy rain and fog, but I wouldn't even attempt to use it in the snow.
It has really changed my life for the better, commuting is now relaxing instead of a stressful nightmare. I don't even remember the last time I drove the car myself on the freeway for more than a few seconds here and there. I don't think I could ever go back to a vehicle without this technology in it, just like I hope I never have to drive an ICE vehicle ever again.
The infuriating thing is that Musk's ego is too fragile to allow a back-down on augmenting cameras with radar and/or lidar in Robotaxis. Lidar instrumentation has gotten much cheaper than it was when Musk ruled it out for Autopilot, and higher-resolution radar is becoming available as well. No one but Tesla is still using vision-only for FSD, and if I was a Tesla shareholder, I'd be screaming for a change of course.
Leaving aside the whole "Swasticar" thing, of course.
You can say the same thing about the Croatian Robotaxi project.
I haven't heard of this one - what is it?
Long story short: Croatian electric automaker Rimac promised to build a fleet of robotaxis that would transport people around the capital of Croatia. Hundreds of millions of euros stemming from both the taxpayers and EU funds have been pumped into the project that has so far had one failed presentation where the car in question was operated by a guy with a joystick.