How Texas’ hands-off approach to autonomous vehicles gave Tesla an opening

Last week, a Tesla Model Y with the word “ROBOTAXI” scratched into its side and no one in the driver seat made a turn off Austin’s bustling South Congress Avenue. Another Tesla, described by autonomous vehicle experts as a “chase vehicle,” followed closely behind. Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the clip, seemingly confirming that the lead car was one of roughly 10 vehicles comprising the company’s robotaxi fleet, expected to make their official debut sometime next week. If that does occur, it will come nearly nine years after Musk first pitched the idea of a “Tesla Network” in which Tesla owners could add their vehicles to an autonomous ridehail fleet. And it will also be made possible, in no small part, by the state of Texas’ laissez-faire, AV-friendly regulatory environment. “In Texas, pretty much anyone can get a \[autonomous vehicles\] permit who shows up and does a few administrative things,” Carnegie Mellon professor and autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman tells The Verge. “If you show up and you tell the state you’re operating and you have insurance, you’re good to go. That’s about it.” Read more from Mark DeGeurin: [https://www.theverge.com/tesla/689286/tesla-robotaxi-austin-texas-law-regulation-safety](https://www.theverge.com/tesla/689286/tesla-robotaxi-austin-texas-law-regulation-safety)

Are drivers license also optional? Aren’t kids basically hardware with untested software?

Robots are the future! Robotics will replace humans doing factory work and possibly delivery services. Taking jobs from young people today in the future.

But now there’s going to be someone sitting in the passenger seat along with the remote supervision with each vehicle followed by another one in a very tight geofenced area and it’s only open to a select few. This is a joke.

People forget why rules and regulations exist till something happens that impacts them..

It paused taking a left in that intersection waiting for those people to cross, but it could have got easily t-boned in those few seconds. A good driver probably would’ve noticed the people crossing out of their periphery and waited before the turn.

I think Musk said Tesla was slow to roll out actual autonomy because of unnecessary regulation. However, Texas has had de minimis regulation so this is untrue (what a surprise). Now that Tesla feels pressure to show "something" on the autonomy front, they're deploying "something". It's as-yet unclear how much tele-operation is occuring or, if the vehicles are autonomous, how often disengagements occur. If Texas regulations don't slow Tesla's deployment, then market forces will. A normal person killing a pedestrian with a manually-driven car because one made a reasonable mistake might result in some hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars of liability. In contrast, a deep-pocketed corporation substantially owned by the richest human on Earth who has crowed for more than a decade about the superiority of his autonomy approach killing that same pedestrian due to a well-known, systemic fault in the system may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars per incident and having the technology banned from the roads indefinitely (e.g. how Cruise lost their permits). It may even lead to states requiring FSD be disabled as a drivers-assist technology, which may lead to mass arbitration suits by owners who would want their FSD payments refunded. Unless Musk can prove to a court much better safety than they probably can at this point, they won't want to expose themselves to that liability so will likely retain close human support, which limits their scalability and makes the project an indefinite cost-center. I'm not a fan of the "fake it till you make it" lifestyle.

They are usually written in blood from the victims of previous accidents or lack of safety... But with a lot of companies, if the fine is cheaper than the profits they make then they go ahead with making the money.

Yep they're replacing 1 driver with 3, plus an extra car

An opportunity to kill people.

Texas has rules and regulations coming in September. Some lawmakers asked Elon to delay the robotaxi rollout.

Doesn’t this fall under jurisdiction of Austin city which can block any legislation from the state??

Other way around. And the lege just loves to pre-empt Austin ordinances just because it’s Austin.

Who cares. It's not like Tesla has a real product.

So the only purpose of any of this is to be able to say that technically speaking they launched something.