Tesla Inc.’s road to an autonomous robotaxi is proving to be not only long but extremely risky.
Since the long-delayed service debuted in Austin on a small scale in late June, and despite the presence of a human Tesla employee in the passenger seat to intervene if needed, incidents have piled up.
Riders’ videos have documented multiple driving issues of the new robotaxis, which are Model Y vehicles with advanced software.
One video showed a robotaxi driving into a lane intended for oncoming traffic for six seconds. In another, a vehicle braked abruptly for no apparent reason, lurching its occupants in the process. The city of Austin’s autonomous vehicle incident dashboard, which tracks safety incidents involving autonomous vehicles in the city, also showed the robotaxi service had its first reported “safety concern” shortly after the so-called pilot launch. (The dashboard tracks safety concerns such as collisions or near misses involving autonomous vehicles from self-driving companies that also include Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and Amazon.com Inc.’s Zoox.)
An especially troubling snafu took three passengers down a set of railroad tracks in Sinking Spring, Pa., WFMZ reported. They were able to safely exit the vehicle before it was struck by a train just minutes later. “[The Tesla] went down the tracks approximately 40-50 feet,” Western Berks Fire Commissioner Jared Renshaw told WFMZ.
Even when Tesla was able to pull off an impressive feat – the first fully autonomous delivery of a vehicle from its Gigafactory in Austin to a buyer’s front door – there was a glitch. The car parked in a clearly marked fire lane.
The incidents have increased scrutiny over the technology’s street-worthiness in spite of claims it was safe and secure. The June 22 launch was under a controlled environment, where robotaxis were limited to a defined map to avoid complex intersections, and won’t operate in inclement weather.
Tesla has hoped to take a more innovative, cost effective approach to distance itself from the pack. While Waymo and others use LiDAR and radar to navigate, Tesla employs cameras — an approach that is cheaper and could let Musk’s company scale up production.
Tesla also boasted of a performance advantage that was backed in a report by Bloomberg Intelligence before the Austin launch.
But critics claim the report’s conclusions were based on a flawed comparison that used data from Tesla’s self-released Autopilot Safety Report, which has long been criticized for lacking transparency, including the fact it doesn’t clarify when Autopilot is actually engaged.
Waymo’s data, by contrast, comes from state-mandated disengagement reports that record each time a human driver is required to take over.
A spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the agency has been in contact with Tesla over the company’s autonomous vehicles.
