This Is Why Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Needed Human Babysitters

On-board helpers, bad-weather suspensions, but no crashes. WIRED asked experts to grade Tesla’s Austin autonomous taxi service—and, crucially, how to know if the system is safe. Read the full article: [https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-robotaxi-launch-needed-human-babysitters/](https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-robotaxi-launch-needed-human-babysitters/)

Even with human babysitters, still manages to fuck up

[https://archive.is/20250704154121/https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-robotaxi-launch-needed-human-babysitters/](https://archive.is/20250704154121/https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-robotaxi-launch-needed-human-babysitters/) unpaywalled

And it's even not autonomous self-driving if you use **anyone** to monitor it and take over when it screws up. It has to fail safely **on its own** to be autonomous. What Tesla seems to be making is a teleoperator-supervised level 2 taxi. And the secrecy does nothing to prove otherwise. They need to be fully open and fully fail-safe, and they are neither at the moment. This is not an autonomous vehicle program.

You don't get it, they're not babysitters they're "flight attendants". There to direct testers on the 12 step process to open the door in case the battery loses power. /s in case it wasn't obvious

It's always been a stock pump program, especially since he overrode his engineers and swore off LiDAR.

“In case of a battery fire, the doors will lock for your convenience. By removing any hope of survival, your last few minutes will give you an opportunity to rethink all your life choices before you slowly burn to death.”

And erase all evidence ?

30 captchas and still they need more buses! Going to sit on the naughty step for a bit and try later.

>its use of human teleoperators, who can either remotely drive or remotely assist its driverless technology Remotaxis

Remotaxis

Because it doesn't work?

Bad bot

Riddle me this: Branch Elonians can buy FSD "Supervised" for their own car...and the "Robotaxis" are supposed to have FSD "Unsupervised". ...but, don't they have a safety driver "supervising"? Is there some South African slang whooshing over my head?

You are training autonomous cars on how to recognize busses.

“The price seems to be a weed joke.” No. This is Nazi-saluting musk who is no pot-head, but rather is using 420 as a reference honoring Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

musk is uses the 420 reference to refer to Hitler’s birthday. Also there was a minor collision recently. A Remotaxi drove into a parked Toyota.

Man this reminds me of those futurism articles from, like, the 50s and 60s where writers speculated that in the year 2000 we'd all live in houses encased in plastic bubbles, brought to you by Dow Chemical, and our cars would all be radio operated by sober minded 'traffic controllers' send out 'telecommands' from a central headquarters someplace in our nearest city. Except those articles were simply idol speculation by people who were guessing, more or less for fun how something like a driverless car would be managed at some point in the future.

There is a person supervising actually sitting in the car, not just at a remote location. So it’s definitely not fully autonomous.

The article incorrectly states that “there have been no publicly reported crashes or fender benders.”

It's because they don't work

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Right. That simple.

Since lithium, like metal fires, burns really, really hot, evidence of you may be erased