Tesla is supposed to offer driverless robotaxis next month. As of last month, it reportedly hasn’t tested a single driverless ride.
Tesla says it’s still on track to launch its driverless robotaxis in Austin next month (or maybe July) but, as of last month, the electric vehicle company had yet to actually test a driverless ride, The Information reports, citing an “engineer close to the testing and a former employee.”
In April, Tesla announced that a very limited set of people — Tesla employees in the Bay Area and Austin — could get a ride in the company’s robotaxis... with a person sitting in the passenger seat. But with its launch just weeks away, there’s no evidence that the company has conducted any “unsupervised, no one in the car” rides yet.
Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo, which launched in Austin earlier this year, tested driverless rides for six months before opening them to the public. Now it’s doing more than a quarter million paid driverless rides per week.
Federal safety investigators would also like to know “how Tesla plans to evaluate its vehicles and driving automation technologies for use on public roads,” including which software the company is planning to deploy and which vehicles will be included in its robotaxi effort.
The robotaxi effort is high stakes for Tesla. CEO Elon Musk said last month, “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots.”
In April, Tesla announced that a very limited set of people — Tesla employees in the Bay Area and Austin — could get a ride in the company’s robotaxis... with a person sitting in the passenger seat. But with its launch just weeks away, there’s no evidence that the company has conducted any “unsupervised, no one in the car” rides yet.
Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo, which launched in Austin earlier this year, tested driverless rides for six months before opening them to the public. Now it’s doing more than a quarter million paid driverless rides per week.
Federal safety investigators would also like to know “how Tesla plans to evaluate its vehicles and driving automation technologies for use on public roads,” including which software the company is planning to deploy and which vehicles will be included in its robotaxi effort.
The robotaxi effort is high stakes for Tesla. CEO Elon Musk said last month, “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots.”
