Did Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Backfire?

Survey data shared exclusively with WIRED suggests that Tesla’s newest autonomous driving technology has freaked out some consumers. Read the full article: [https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-robotaxi-launch-survey-data/](https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-robotaxi-launch-survey-data/)

So many shareholders honestly were holding this as the 2nd coming of Jesus. On etoro plenty of retail investors still thinking that this is going to kill off all the competition. Either I'm totally blind or they are.

They'll be into the next one. Apparently they're gonna be building wildly unprofitable diners now.

Remember when they said the new Model Y would jumpstart sales as they were seeing people were just holding onto their money, waiting to get it.

‘Launch’ is a bit of a stretch. The public can’t use it. It’s about as useful as their robots so far.

Remember when the cultists thought the 7500 tax rebate was gonna kick sales into high gear in 2024?

They all believe in the “magic” of their approach to using AI/machine learning to do it. So they all ignore problems, because they truly believe it will one day “click” and it will suddenly just work. The thought of “Tesla is behind but their approach will let them skip past the competition and as soon as they do, they will suddenly have millions of taxis on the road.” What it looks like in reality is that they got 80% of the way to FSD and they will never advance much past that. They will go from 80 to 80.01 to 80.02 and a year from now be at 80.1.

What launch?

Robotaxis are last weeks news. Have you heard about the new Tesla diner?

They'll correct you that some in the public who signed up for the invites can now at the new $6.90 price point. It is however prepared to launch unwitting pedestrians and cyclists it fails to see around Austin.

Exactly. Tesla is going to massively DISRUPT the legacy “drive-in-burger SPACE” with the GIGAGRILL that will produce the entire burger by growing the beef and grain for the bun within the GIGAGRILL itself in one continuous process.

Musk said there would be up to 10,000 robotaxis at launch... there was 10.

It worked. The stock price went up by hundreds of billions.

Nope, I think without it the stock would have crashed. Luckily for Elmo, he just needs a tiny trickle of positive-ish news for his snakeoil products to keep it propped up.

Remember it was the Dems that gave incentives lol.   Cameras only will never work.  Even BYD uses lidar.

And how lol Leons' being pushed to release something else he's been promising for years .. and it's going about as well as every other poorly thought out, non-tested technology that's been released to the public too soon. Let's just hope it gets shut down before someone else gets hurt.

Paywall https://archive.is/Ea4zf

”They all believe in the “magic” of their approach to using AI/machine learning to do it.” I worked on a project for Volvo Cars like 10 years ago, bit more than 10 years, they already used machine learning for self driving back then so my guess is all main car manufacturers were by then and still are today. Tesla is only unique in their horrendous lack of moral in testing their tech on unprotected american citizens.

And they were human taxis with extra steps though.

So instead of Plaid trim they'll have Wagyu trim?

> The thought of “Tesla is behind but their approach will let them skip past the competition and as soon as they do, they will suddenly have millions of taxis on the road.” I've never understood this as it implies no one else could be doing this. It could very well be that Waymo and other rivals are taking the visual camera data, shunting it off to a second dataset and are attempting to train a model that can run on-car using only cameras. They aren't doing that on public roads right now because it's unsafe and they know it's unsafe. It took Ford a long while to get rid of the stigma of the Pinto and self-driving car companies are doing their best to avoid that fate (except for Tesla, of course).

This is basically it, Tesla were the ones to say “fuck it, let’s see what happens”

I think he meant come have lunch not launch

Just another ELMO flop. Over promise to drive up the stock, under deliver & fail as usual. Rinse & repeat. #FUCKELMO #FUCKTESLA #TESLATAKEDOWN

Technically 10 is ‘up to 10,000’ lol

It's only a matter of time for someone to get hit by one

Pay wall!

We've been told that FSD has been ready for a decade. We were told that Robo Taxis would have no steering wheel. We were told that the cars would go coast to coast with no user intervention. Reality, they're just Tesla cars with the buggy FSD software, a steering wheel, a Tesla employee in the passenger seat, that can only go between a few blocks in Austin.

Some tesla fans have problems with reconciling tesla propaganda with reality. I watched quite a few of the first day rides of tesla influencers and what struck me the most is how they were saying that this is true revolution. It's first day of the new age. Now it all begins. Meanwhile every minute you could see driverless waymo passing them by without the driver why they are stting in the car with supervisor. For some reason competition is just taxis but tesla robotaxis are magic.

Butt

Nobody does a diner in space better than Spaceballs

I believe that this process is essentially called “fake it till you make it”

Yea, happy to risk public lives for $$&

Its a cult... anyone who knows just a tiny bit of software and hardware knows how its impossible. No LiDAR, will never gonna work.

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You know it will have Cantina mode.

>They all believe in the “magic” of their approach to using AI/machine learning to do it. >So they all ignore problems, because they truly believe it will one day “click” and it will suddenly just work. I was recently talking to someone that believed vision-only would eventually be capable of being just as good at determining the distance to an object as a direct measurement from a dedicated sensor if you keep the money furnace running for long enough. And if you're open-ended enough about how much time, money, and compute resources it will take to get there I can humor that argument. But the fact they acknowledged all of that and still thought "develop a product that doesn't work well until the money furnace eventually figures out how to make it work as well as a sensor at some unknown point in the future" was a better approach than "just use an actual sensor to measure it" told me they are just a nonserious person.

That was my first thought too. Being a meme stock at this point it's not about the general public or actual viability ... it's about pumping the price.

Apple fans are the same way though. I’m an Apple user but it drives me nuts when the cult loses their collective minds over a feature than is completely mundane or has been available on Android for years.

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Yeah, the robot can fill a bag of popcorn in 9 minutes. Thats the future we have all been waiting for. Jumbo video figured it out 40 years ago. Leave a scoop in the popcorn and let chaos reign.

Like when your robotaxi tries to kill you by driving through a train crossing with the arm down but you still think the tech is amazing. To any rational person that would be a fail but not to them.

And unique in only relying on vision sensors with mid-tier resolution.

If I remember correctly, that ride — the one where it would’ve ended up under a train — got a lousy A, while the other one got an A+.

Of course, it’s Elon.

> testing their tech on unprotected american citizens there is no other population where you can do that, only USA is having corporations that much protected from consequwnces

I am more in the school that sensors to measure distance will become cheap enough if you keep the money furnace long enough

When people say "Tesla influencers", what they really mean is Tesla shareholders with a Tesla hyping youtube channel or blog. Tesla "fanbois" are shareholders, with or without the influencers channels. These people don't know about all the technology on the market and in development. They only care about and only focus on Tesla. Waymo's already doing real autonomous driving open to the public in multiple cities, but most of these influencers have never been in one and have never really spent time looking into what Waymo is doing, so to them it doesn't even exist. Waymo isn't built on stock pumping. It's operated by one of the most valuable companies around that doesn't have a massive forward PE like Tesla (meaning Tesla's stock is hyper inflated versus their actual financial results). They have the resources and the talent to meticulously produce a viable product. Tesla OTOH decided to use their customers as free testers/trainers for their system while those folks took on full liability in the event that FSD made any mistakes. In fact, they not only were defact unpaid employees... they actually paid for the opportunity to be unpaid Tesla employees. These people trade Tesla because, even though Tesla has never actually justified its share price financially, it still made these folks a lot of money and made them internet famous given the cult like clicks of everything Tesla related on YT. At one point, (maybe it still is today), if you so much as hovered over a Tesla related video on YT, you'd get inundated with Tesla videos in your recommendations list. The entire system was setup to try and lure you into the Tesla stock pumper community.

It's so fun to say asymptotic curve!

Looks like Waymo is winning so far.

> At one point, (maybe it still is today), if you so much as hovered over a Tesla related video on YT, you'd get inundated with Tesla videos in your recommendations list. The entire system was setup to try and lure you into the Tesla stock pumper community. That's still true as I get recommended those videos daily. They always have titles saying something truly gamechanging happened to tesla and it'a always a nothing burger.

Agreed. And while those sensors are getting cheaper, you're reliably feeding accurate data to the self-driving system (which is the product you're actually trying to develop). With vision-only, before you even get to that stage of development you have to overcome the massive challenge of developing the machine vision system to the point where it can replace radar/lidar/ultrasonic/etc sensors.

Did it actually launch really?

You're not blind....

Based on their stock price being up yet again… apparently no

Did you not see it deliver a bag of popcorn?

I already look at Tesla drivers as Uber drivers, now they're just Ubers

Tesla FSD per mile is 99.9% accurate. That sounds fine but that is one incident per 1000 miles. You need to be at 99.9999%. One incident per 1,000,000 miles. They are factors away from that. They have not move a decimal point in years.

It’s a closed alpha and still requires both safety drivers and 100% remote monitoring. It did not launch.

Ford had to run “Quality is Job #1” ads for _decades_ after the Pinto

Is Elon a fraud? Same answer.

“Either I’m totally blind or they are” This is how I feel about Tesla bulls and Elon Stans in general.

"I'll buy almost anything if it's shiny and made by Apple..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

I had a good laugh with that one

There’s no robotaxi & there wasn’t a launch of them. Just more Musk theater.

It’s the land of the free (for companies to do what they want)

What you’re still talking about FSD??!?! Don’t you know TESLA diner is what it’s actually all about out!?!? $2 trillion in revenue with global roll out next year!!!

> They all believe in the “magic” of their approach to using AI/machine learning to do it. > > So they all ignore problems, because they truly believe it will one day “click” and it will suddenly just work. > > They believe it because one specific person has been lying about it with no repercussions for decades now.

There are a large number of them that think the driving algorithms are far more advanced on the taxi service. Yes there is a new taxi load I am sure. For taxi things. The actual driving aspect is still exactly the same. It will not drive safer then the current system. Just do a few taxi things like pull over and ignore there is no one in the drivers seat.

That can only last for so long. Lawsuits are ongoing and I am sure more to come.

\> Tesla FSD per mile is 99.9% accurate. Where is that number from? Last number I read was one intervention per 23 miles on average. Maybe inflated to a hundred miles by adding high ways.

No, because Tesla didn't launch anything, they just did a publicity stunt.

Does a bear shit in the woods...?

>Musk told investors in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, that’s just the wrong framework. If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.” "Doesn't believe"? So it's a faith thing then?

Also: >Musk initially said no one other than the customer would be inside the self-driving Teslas, but the automaker installed human safety operators in the front passenger seat of each car to intervene **when** the tech fails. WHEN? Not, "if", WHEN.

First Waymo, then Waffle House. Unstoppable!

I’d be practically living in a cross walk if I was in Austin right now waiting for that sweet sweet payout.

This is something that was very obvious with machine learning. As a rule of a thumb getting to 70-80% was „fairly easy” but going forward it was getting exponentially more difficult. I don’t understand on what basis people expect anything different with self driving or LLMs.

Musk paid tons of bribes (political contributions)

Then Tesla will blame you for the accident because it is never their fault.

The Apple silicon platform is a major advancement in performance vs watts. Tesla has n never made something like that.

Jokes on them. I identify as Tesla

Yes?

I just experienced FSD for the first time this week. It was impressive, but it had its hiccups. There was one of those road closed/caution type barricades on a residential road, but it was just marking a hole, and the Tesla came to a complete stop and had no idea what to do. Any human would have seen you can just drive around it. We also missed an exit on a little interchange. I’m not sure the broader market will trust it yet.

I actually might be a bit high on that 1000 miles. I believe it give critical control to a driver once every 380 miles. Bit more than the 23 but that is not even close to being ready. Most times when it give up control it is not in a particularly dangerous situation so I kind of use the 1000 miles at a bench mark of serious situations. That needs to be closer to 1 million miles. Also, and this is rather key, it only works in decent weather. This is at times when human drivers have far fewer accidents. So Tesla/Musk is comparing FSD in the best conditions to humans in the worst conditions. And when it does give up control, it does not count that as an FSD accident. In all weather conditions, ya it likely would give up control on average every 23 miles.

“Really, we should be thought of as an AI robotics company,” Musk told investors in April. “If you value Tesla as just an auto company … fundamentally, that’s just the wrong framework.” That’s true. The other day I was doing my term paper on my Model S when I realized I had a dental appointment, so I got in my Prius and left. /s

It didn't backfire with Tesla fanboys despite the fact that it's completely fake and a lie.

I've never seen any evidence that Optimus, for example, has ever learned to do anything despite all the 'training'.

I’m so tired of hearing all the excuses from the usual ‘influencer’ sycophants about how these are still the early days for the Robotaxi. So that means all those years of collected data and neural link whatever from the millions of FSD miles driven, to include the very same streets in Austin, amounted to nothing? This most ‘advanced’ self driving system hasn’t learned anything from all that & basically starting from scratch?

Tesla put a teleoperated robot to serve popcorn to customers. Besides it being slow, it also froze. [https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/tesla-teleoperated-robot-fail-serving-popcorn-first-day-new-diner/](https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/tesla-teleoperated-robot-fail-serving-popcorn-first-day-new-diner/)

a kind soul shared this link: [https://archive.is/Ea4zf](https://archive.is/Ea4zf)

>Just over half of those surveyed said they were less convinced that Tesla’s robotaxis were safe. Over 30 percent said they strongly believed self-driving taxis should be illegal. (Twenty-four percent said they weren’t sure.) I think if it was up to vote, people would make autonomous taxis illegal. Or at least, it would be subjected to stronger regulations.

It's not too late to sell, tsla will never hit $400+ again.

There ain't no monorail and there never was.