In regards to the video of the self-driving tesla delivery

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Do we know what, if anything, was the legal basis for this journey?

\^This is the question. What is the legal basis for a car moving on the road with no driver? Who has the legal liability in the event of an incident? It's all a PR stunt for the time being. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn't tell you anything about the ability of Tesla (or any other company) to more widely deploy this as a delivery mechanism.

This 100%. Means absolutely nothing - FSD is good enough to do a route like this with guardrails and pre-planning, which I assume happened, but that's nowhere close to good enough for general deliveries, let alone a robotaxi.

Which is why ts a smoke and mirrors stunt to boost stock... I call it more fraud. The worst thing is, the gullible will believe their cars can also self-drive and there will be more people hurt and added to this list; [https://www.tesladeaths.com/](https://www.tesladeaths.com/)

There is only a very small area in Austin Tesla is allowed to do FSD.

It is legal in Texas. But a new law was enacted recently which will require permit. Takes effect on 1 Sept

Because Tesla's system lacks the hardest part of all - reliability. In particular, quantifiable reliability which is the basis for determining risk economics. And risk is \*\*the\*\* cost center for any safety-critical system - far eclipsing anything like vehicle unit cost, for example. Even if you are inclined to believe that everything Musk said about this was on the level (and I don't, given that Musk is a proven serial liar), a safety-critical system \*\*seemingly\*\* achieving something once or even a handful of times cannot be differentiated from luck. The 737 MAX flex over a year without incident before the first fatal incident. But the aircraft was never safe, from Day 1. Its luck just ran out. Fundamentally, it is incongruent that Tesla at this stage: 1. Would have physical safety operators in their vehicles during commercial taxi operations (that is, yet another human that can accept \*\*all\*\* of the risk costs for Tesla); and 2. Would be comfortable routinely delivering vehicles "autonomously" to customer endpoints.

It's always legal when you have enough money to buy the government out

Yes, thats where we have video footage of the car driving into oncoming traffic and another car hitting a parked car. But now we're supposed to believe this one car can drive itself with no safety passenger without any fault? I think it's another staged video... otherwise why aren't they delivering all cars the same way??

Will it, though? This is the new law: [https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/pdf/SB02807F.pdf](https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/pdf/SB02807F.pdf) It makes this definition: >"Automated motor vehicle" means a motor vehicle on which an automated driving system is installed that is capable of being operated with Level 4 automation or Level 5 automation. Everything in the new law only seems to apply to automated motor vehicles. In my view neither robotaxi, nor the car being delivered here, are SAE Level 4. They are SAE Level 2, which means that this new law has no application to what Tesla are doing. As far as I can see, legally, the person in the passenger seat, in the case of robotaxi, and whoever was releoperating, in the case of the delivery, are legally the driver, even if they don't intervene, in exactly the same way that the many people who regularly use FSD (supervised) are. Or does someone know different?

So they are risking public safety to show a demo of what might be if they had the capability to do it all the time...but they know they can't. It's just another risky stunt to improve the stock price.

>What is the legal basis for a car moving on the road with no driver? Who has the legal liability in the event of an incident? More generally, what should be the consequences for a "self driving" vehicle making a mistake? If I get a couple of speeding tickets my insurance would go up, and if I make a serious mistake I could lose my license or maybe even go to jail. So if a car with a large number of replicas makes a mistake, should insurance for all of those cars go up? If one of them makes a serious mistake, should all of them be removed from the roads until that issue is fixed? If it's a really serious mistake, should the programmers or management potentially face jail time? (We all know management probably won't.) Autonomous vehicles need to be extra safe partly because there probably won't be significant consequences if they screw up - at least in the US.

I am not defending Tesla I think their Roboxtaxi rollout is a joke but my point is there is only a small area in Austin they are allowed to use FSD.

Repeat after me: Full self-driving will be available next year...

With the max, a lot of the issue was lack of redundancy. So once components started failing with age, they started to crash.  I hadn't even thought about how that will effect FSD, but it certainly might. I've seen many FSD testers cars force takeover because the system crashed. What happens when there isn't a person in the seat.

Is it any different from what Tesla has always done? Safety costs, which are enormous, are like matter or energy. They cannot be destroyed. But they can be transferred. The entire FSD Beta program was nothing more than Tesla shifting \*\*all\*\* of their safety costs onto the public while Tesla lazily reaped all of the rewards. I view every fruit of that program as being simply a variation of that. A development program that never had to be concerned about safety costs is a development program that never had any motivation to \*\*quantify risk\*\*. And this last bit explains why #1 and #2 are incongruent.

The Tesla model is to disengage the FSD software immediately prior to a crash, so as to devolve liability back to the driver.

not allowed.....but decided to do because it is easy. Tesla, not texas, made that decision.

It was that the 737 MAX never had a safety lifecycle maintained from the start. On a systems level, which exceeded the scope of the physical aircraft itself. In part, human pilots were not sufficiently brought into a would-be safety lifecycle that Boeing had a principle responsibility to maintain. Human pilots were not sufficiently integrated into the physical aircraft system. And so huge systematic failure modes just went unseen and unaddressed. Indeed, though. Uptime and hard real-time control are vital aspects of these systems - and are quite difficult and costly to maintain.

I don't think that is true! Tesla decided their cars couldn't deal with intersections, controlled access highways and so on - so THEY set a tiny area for their few cars.

>The Tesla model is to disengage the FSD software immediately prior to a crash, so as to devolve liability back to the driver. It's worse than that: the driver has all liability whether "FSD" is engaged or not. Disengaging just adds a layer of plausible deniability.

Paint It Black 2: Electric Boogaloo

Technically it is true they could use FSD in a larger geofenced area in Austin. What I was responding to was the OP questioned why Tesla wasn't delivering cars without a driver everywhere.

Funny But the truth is Tesla is a stock promotion company with (easily) a 20x over valuation  It's just a PR move / stock pump as usual

I strongly suspect that the delivery route was heavily premapped, like they premapped the geofenced area for their robotaxis, to identify intersections and situations they didn't trust FSD to handle. It was only after ruling out roots they didn't trust in finding at least one route they did trust, that they actually let this happen. Which if true is kind of reassuring from a safety standpoint, but tells us FSD is far from ready for full autonomy without substantial premapping.

It parked in a red zone.

Or and hear me out. They had a human remote drive it. Wouldn't be the 1st smoke and mirrors 'Oh the great OZ' moment for these fuckers.

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Also, is anyone else not impressed after seeing it? That was the shortest, easiest drive I’ve ever seen.

It really is. Elon running with Trump tracked as both are first and foremost grifters.

The cars can self drive . I’ve driven mine lots of times with no interventions . However it’s the 1-2% of the time that is does something really fucking weird that a driver needs to take over, and those are scary af.

Safe environment, the car in front was driven by Tesla employee, and so was the chase car. Basically the “self driving” car was driving in a motorcade envelope.

The Tesla lounge is all excited over this. Call me crazy, but I do not trust a remote control capable car from a company owned by a Nazi.

Everybody knows that FSD can drive a certain amount of miles without problems. The issue is it inevitably crashes without driver intervention after x miles. That is why they dont have the permission to use FSD without supervision anywhere. This is a publicity stunt possible since many years. But it also meaningless, because if they repeat this a couple of times, a crash would happen.

Grifters are going to grift. I don’t believe a thing he says. He couldn’t even make my automatic windshield wipers work properly.

Tesla says ‘delivery.’ Was this a sale or lease? The articles I’ve read say ‘to a customer,’ so yes? If they’d already purchased, would the liability of the car be on its owner? In US, insurance follows the car, not the ‘driver,’ correct?

No one who has ever used Tesla FSD for any amount of time believes it’s actually FSD. I’ve used Tesla FSD since 2018 and it’s improved dramatically this year -about three months ago with version 13.2.9: even with that, it still sucks. I won’t let my kids use it. They have to drive the car themselves bc FSD is unreliable and accident prone even on a bright sunny day and no construction zone. There is a very large, very popular mall near us with 48 Tesla superchargers but for whatever reason going home from there always requires taking over navigation and FSD because left to itself, the car will just go around and around the mall. The first time this happened, the car on FSD was going to drive into the signage/middle at a fork between two highway entrances. I use to think when we first bought a Tesla in 2018 that by the time our kids were old enough to drive, they wouldn’t need to. Elon is such a liar…. About as reliable as Tesla FSD.

Same as the robotaxi. If it actually worked, there would be thousands of them now.

I doubt 'it actually needs supervision' will hold in courts in Europe. You put that on internet and the conclusion can only be 'consumer can expect FSD without supervision'.

Elon faked the video years ago, why should I believe this even happened as they claim this time around?

Quote from Elon every year since 2016. You missed it completely.

In this case, I'd say that Tesla is responsible until the buyer takes possession. Tesla lawyers might argue differently, but they'd be wrong.

They probably had a chase car following the entire time with an emergency stop button. Who knows if they actually had to run the route several times before getting a flawless run. Regardless, unless they are able to start doing this for a large number of deliveries, then what's the point. It's just another stock pump.

These are the same guys who completely faked a video of FSD back in 2017.  Why would anyone believe this is different?

I saw part of the vid and wondered who on earth would want to be filmed getting delivery of a new Tesla, admitting that they’d bought one!

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When did you come back!?! Long time no see.

They probably sent ALL the cars, but only one arrived safely.

I agree that this has almost always been the Tesla way. Just offload liability to some other party, make the vehicle more confident than it should be and try to sand down whatever bumps you end up with after that. I also think it ends being a matter of just parsing the statements made by Tesla about what was accomplished super carefully too. From what I've seen they simply stated that no one was in the vehicle and no remote operation was involved. However I don't think that precludes remote monitoring and oversight. There was obviously a CT traveling close by to photograph stuff and I think it's completely possible they had a low latency wireless rig monitoring the vehicle for the entire drive. They literally had what I think is the FSD team and potentially some additional people involved in making this video in a photo with the delivered vehicle here: https://xcancel.com/Tesla/status/1938816477127418224#m I doubt this was an out of the blue thing where everyone dropped what they were doing to rush out there from an impromptu promo photo, especially on the back of the robotaxi service launch. This was something that was planned, carefully monitored and orchestrated from the get go with a lot of time and eyeballs devoted to making it happen.

Yup. Agreed. Some other observations: 1. To my knowledge, Musk and Tesla popped this as a surprise. Announced that the "autonomous delivery" was completed before it was expected. No big event. No pre-announcement. No fanfare. 2. Proceeded to take a few hours to fluff up a video and then post it out. Taken together, I see a big hedge here. At minimum, Tesla/Musk wanted to make sure that the vehicle made it without incident prior to going public. If it had crashed or if there was some other incident, Tesla/Musk could have buried it. The press probably would have found out eventually - but weeks, months or possibly years later. But what I think is more probable, is that they ran the route multiple times - and downstream selected the most visually-performant one. And we have been down that road \*\*several\*\* times before with Tesla. Would explain the manufacturer plates on the delivery vehicle. Would explain also why the "delivery customer" popped up on Twitter with a brand new account post-delivery. ALSO, so you are telling me that the Meme Lord that lives day and night on social media did not live stream this thing, on X, with a Tesla employee in the backseat of the delivery vehicle? On such a milestone occasion for the company? I find it hard to believe. Another hedge.

Your not wrong https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/musk-tesla-tweets-trial-1.6716281

Also given their shitty build quality who would take one without inspection

But how was this even legally possible? The Robotaxi’s currently operating on the streets in Austin require strict geo fencing & even safety drivers on board, this ‘self’ delivery obviously doesn’t have any of those.

Level 4: Horror

Thank you for being honest!

If they want to make a trillion dollars with self driving cars.....then just do it. No fanfare is needed. Just. Fucking. Do. it. Who's stopping them? "Regulators"?

What specific Austin regulation requires the safety passenger?

30 minutes away, about half of that at highway speeds.

It’s a camera mount, per the videographer.

It is doctored video, and pretty soon we will learn that it was all a lie. Remember the FSD video Tesla was forced to admit it was heavily edited

Pretty sure it was remote controlled with the lack of angles in their lame video

I have seen it a 1000 times at least on this sub. its boring to see 1001

> Tesla lawyers might argue differently, but they'd be wrong. but you need money to fight them

Railroads are, or at least were, hyper safety aware. Luck runs out, safety’s good for life. Be safe today, go home tonight. All sorts of slogans, with totally anonomous safety reporting and multiple fail safes turned a deadly industry in 1880 into one of the safest in 1960. I knew that when we went one minute over the max on duty time the train got “parked”. Railroads planned on having relief crews on hand when trains were running late to station. But then dollars started playing a hand. Luck runs out, everbody dies.

There were several Max incidents before the fatal crashes. They were non-events easily handled by the pilots. Unfortunately it isn't acceptable to tell the truth about Third World aviation. Incompetent pilots, inadequate training and improper maintenance are the norm in many developing countries.

Maybe he declined delivery after it arrived and it drove back home.

Yes, exactly, I presumed it was mostly teleoperated as soon as I heard of it. The biggest issue is the lies, not that anyone has any inherent or irrational hatred for self driving cars like tsla stans claim. I was just waiting too see the legal train wreck when one of these harm or does worse to someone or something on the way to the customer, but as it was a one-off event to pump stocks and hype up the fanboys it is irrelevant.

A news article from Jan 18, 2023 about a video from 2016!