Fully autonomous robotaxis are rolling out in Austin

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*Grabs Popcorn*

Apparently people have seen two license plates. They're not picking up passengers, they're just rolling around racking up miles for licensing or whatever.

[Testing without passengers/riders](https://i.imgur.com/gLDkUD4.jpeg)

They are also starting to drive around Phoenix Az recently

🍿🍿🍿 Ready for a good show, sure it will be.

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1. That 1% is where accidents happen. 2. Even with driver's intervention, they had 3 accidents in July and 4 in September. 3. If you drive Tesla daily, you should have already known that cameras are often blinded by sunlight. FSD will disengage. You don't want to be in that robotaxi when one of its cameras is blinded.

1. Accidents can and will happen, just as they do with Waymo with approx 20% of their fleet being involved in an accident in the past year. Tesla have shown an abundance of caution in this regard as they know how the press will jump on them at any sign of an issue. 2. Did the Tesla cause those accidents, or were they caused by another human driver? 3. If you drive a Tesla daily then you should know that the HW4 cameras with the latest software are no longer blinded by the sun. There are Youtubers who have done extensive testing on this if you don't believe me.

Nah I’ve definitely had hw4 be blinded by the sun

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With FSD 14.2.1? I would also point out that LiDAR solutions have problems when facing directly into the sun as well, they're still based on vision it's just they're using an active light source to create a point cloud, with filtering and processing based on that light source.

It’s still a secondary light source in a different frequency on a different vector. And no not on 14.2.1, it’s relatively rare and timing based

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A secondary light source that can still be swamped by the sun, giving false readings or outright blinding the camera. It's reportedly a non-issue on the 14.2 branch at least, and Tesla are said to be working on a more direct sensor to neural net pipeline that bypasses the traditional intermediate processing that will further improve camera response. Don't forget that even LiDAR based solution still need a working vision system to see things like lane markings, debris, read signs, see traffic lights, and so on. No car will be able to drive without a camera system that works in blinding sunlight.

Yeah, it's like a total sensor suite with redundancy is a good idea rather than relying one specific tech...

Massively expensive? I have LiDAR on my robovac

I’ve had a Highland Model 3 for a year and 12k miles (90% driven with FSD active) and have had ZERO interventions in any conditions. Sun, rain, fog, on highway, in city, through construction, dirt roads, and not once has FSD disengaged. Most peoples’ understanding of FSD is severely outdated

Waymo pays $1500-$6000 per car for lidar sensor, but some cheaper options exist, as cheap a $200. It depends on how big of an area you want covered

You’re operating off of dated knowledge. The cost of LiDAR units is now only a few hundred dollars.

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No thanks, I’d rather not argue with an idiot with experience

And yet that's not being reflected in real world capabilities. Yes, Waymo are ahead of Tesla in terms of number of fee paying journeys particularly when unsupervised. But if the difference is the sensor suite then why are all the other manufacturers and companies using LiDAR behind Tesla in capability. And LiDAR doesn't help you in other conditions like running in snow, where FSD 14.2.1 drives really quite well in the snow. Tesla have more or less caught up with Waymo, certainly if they're on the brink of going unsupervised as they reportedly are and with evidence like this supporting that notion. If, and I'll accept that's an if until it's actually demonstrated, Tesla have caught Waymo in capability then that's basically the fight over between them. Waymo have 2k cars and are looking to expand that to 10k cars in the next couple of years. Tesla's manufacturing capability absolutely eclipses that, and is entirely dependent on their own pipeline rather than having to buy cars from another manufacturer to then extensively upgrade. They could potentially put 10k cars on the road every two days if they were throwing all their manufacturing capability at the Robotaxi, or if they roll out the ability for the general public to rent out their cars and it's widely adopted. Who would you bet will be first to get 100k cars on the road across the US as driverless taxis? I would be surprised if Waymo got to 100k before Tesla got to 10m across the world.

So who is the "testing environment"? Pedestrians and other drivers? Interesting...

That looks scary.

What would you like it to be? I'm asking a serious question here

Why does it look scary?

Maybe some sort of private test track where the system has to “pass its driving test” before being let loose on public streets?

But they do that, and they have tons of data from it running in the background of actual driving cars. At some point, they need to actually put it on the streets and that's where they currently are in the testing phase. You can't add 3 dogs chasing a loose donkey, an ice cream man backing out, and a trash bag blowing across the test track, while getting flagged in to oncoming traffic in a construction zone. There are too many possible scenarios and it needs that data being collected from real vehicles to learn all of that.

> “pass its driving test” before being let loose on public streets? Yes, they have already done that. This is the next step.

Good to know. What is the test called? I’d like to learn more.

Why does this matter? Waymo has been taking actual passengers in Austin. When Tesla trusts its teslas to actually carry paying human passengers without a babysitter, then maybe it matters.

Scary to me too. Cause I have family who live in Austin.

It's called all the steps required by state law before you can operate an autonomous vehicle on public roads. Look into it, interesting stuff. Each state / country is different, which is why roll out is slow for all brands.

We can agree that Tesla is assuming liability if these things crash, right? And they're on public roads with other humans driving. So... it matters. Real stakes, real performance. Adding a passenger will further increase the stakes, but it'd be disingenuous to insinuate that there are not currently real stakes, or that these real stakes don't "matter". I'm sure the real humans driving next to these cars would say that it matters quite a bit.

I completely agree with you. I mean why does it matter in the sense that this is not impressive.

Do you have details on those accidents?

[https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/](https://electrek.co/2025/11/17/tesla-robotaxi-had-3-more-crashes-now-7-total/)

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7x safer than a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/fsd/safety

1. No one is denying "Accidents can and will happen." 2. "Did the Tesla cause those accidents, or were they caused by another human driver?" Tesla chose to not disclose them. No need to speculate in any direction. 3. HW4 cameras mitigated the issue? Yes, for sure. 100% solved? No, unless Tesla can change physics or how CMOS works.

A lot of things look scary if your IQ is room temperature...

Yeah, any post on this topic brings out every mouth breathing goon on Reddit.

Self driving isn’t scary. Waymo isn’t scary. Tesla tech is scary.

Oh safety stats from Tesla on … Tesla’s website. No bias there. Wouldn’t trust their safety records anymore than their finances.

Why is it so much more impressive to you having a passenger vs it driving itself without a passenger? For instance - imagine the car drives up (by itself with no one in it) and picks up a passenger and drives off. It transitioned from not impressive to impressive as soon as the passenger sat down?

What I don’t get is, people/investors geeking out over a Tesla spotted in Austin without a driver. Waymo has had those all over Austin for a long time and actually taking fares and carrying passengers. So, yeah, it’s just not that impressive a thing to see in Austin.

(First of all, I appreciate the respectful and productive dialog) I think the reason people are geeked is that for a long time Waymo proponents would say, "you have to have lidar to do this". Three views: Bystander - not impressive; we've seen driverless cars for a while Engineer - impressive; here is a new technology for driverless cars that's cheaper and easier to deploy Investor - extremely impressive; the implication here is Tesla is ready to take liability. They produce thousands of these cars a week; they could flood the whole country with them next year and would leave Waymo in the dust

It’s just a lot of hyperbole and IFs. I agree, if Tesla can flood the country with these, and they are exceedingly safe, it would be most impressive. But a video of a driverless Tesla in Austin is a million miles from that outcome at this point and just seems premature. I will say, I live in a snowy city that is currently a testing ground for Waymo. The Ubers and Lyfts I’ve had lately are an unpleasant experience, so I welcome whoever can replace those options with something better. I am interested to see how Waymo does, but I don’t have a dog in this fight. Don’t know enough about the tech to say how well non-lidar Tesla does in snowy conditions, which tends to cake a vehicle in mud and slush, but I am interested to find out.

I can't find any records on the NHTSA site for those accidents. There was no injuries reported, even for the one involving a cyclist.

Who said there were injuries?

Tesla tech is scary? Have you personally owned or driven the vehicle in self driving mode?

Your inability to understand reality is scary

Rely on camera sensors only? No thanks. I live where it snows. Waymo already testing here. We’ll see how it goes, but Tesla as far as I can see is still stuck in Austin showing off how their car can drive without a baby sitter.

Nobody. I'm not seeing these reports as being significant, *on their own*. I know of at least 2 other "accidents" that aren't significant either. That's why I'd like to see more detailed reporting of them. The fact that there hasn't been any big news stories about them makes me think that Tesla is doing very well with their robotaxis.

Hey there. u/SanDiegoMitch asked a question 14 hours ago. What is your answer to him?

Maybe, or maybe Tesla's legal and PR teams are too good... Anyway, accidents are accidents. IMHO. We shouldn't lower our expectations on safety to "no injuries." Not for Tesla. Not for Waymo. Not for any robotaxi.

Do you really think they let cars loose on public streets without testing them before?

then show us better stats?

No. I just don’t know that the government has a setup / regs to give them a pass/fail “driving test” before setting them loose on public streets.

has Tesla put out the profit projections for a robo fleet --do they have a different app for ride hailing service?

Hell no. But I see the accident reports. The “self driving” cars in Austin have averaged one crash per 40K miles traveled (8 crashes reported against only 250K miles traveled). And that’s with a safety driver in the cars! Humans crash roughly once every 500K miles traveled (even if that’s a high estimate, cut that down to every 100K and it’s still better than Tesla Johnny Cab)

Cyber cabs in Austin. 8 confirmed crashes. 250K miles driven (with safety driver). That’s not safer than a human driver by measure of pure statistics. But I mean, nowhere to hide now. The cars are driving around on their own in Austin. It will either work safely, or it won’t.

> But a video of a driverless Tesla in Austin is a million miles from that outcome I completely disagree, it is a major step towards that outcome, and proves that they are close to achieving their goal. As has been discussed here ad nauseam there is a big difference between Waymo's approach and Teslas approach. Teslas approach is technically more difficult initially but once that is complete it can scale worldwide relatively quickly, Waymo's approach cannot. That is why this is significant.

How is it a major step towards flooding the entire country with autonomous vehicles?! Nobody outside the company even knows if this one car was driving with or without remote assistance either. When Tesla trusts multiple cyber cars in Austin to start letting random customers hail them as cabs and drive truly autonomously, then a major step forward will have happened. This little video of one car without a driver means nothing.

Interesting, I did some research and that seems to be right. Lets hope its due to the low sample size.

> Hell no. So you have no idea what you're talking about. Got it.

My tesla stocks going crazy. Investing is easy

Do they have chase cars or continuous remote operators?

Going to be exiting to see it available to half the US by the end of the year...

Unknown but unlikely to have chase cars. There's likely remote monitoring but not continuous, only when actually necessary.

Waymos crash every 98,600 miles. The 500,000 mile figure is those "reported to police", not every time someone hits a cat (as with one of the seven accidents involving Teslas) * 27 MPH impact with an animal crossing the road * stopped, impact with cyclist * 6MPH impact with a vehicle backing up that resulted in the Tesla being towed * 6 MPH impact with a fixed object while making a left turn

You better soak up that excitement now because you will not see that by next Christmas 🎅🏻

If this is the case, why hasn’t Waymo been lauded and have a 400 billion dollar valuation? They’ve literally been running a legitimate robot taxi company for years with 2,000 cars now. What exactly would make the Tesla investor so excited?

It's a good step, though the headline in this thread isn't really accurate until they're also picking up passengers with no driver. Right now it's still in a testing phase, albeit a more advanced one than before (when they still had the safety monitors).

just about all of the real humans are much worse drivers. we will start to see humans doing dumb shit on a tesla camera that caused a crash

You realize Waymo doesn't make their own cars, have a far more expensive hardware stack, and much more costly rollout approach (pre-mapping with lidar). 2,000 cars literally doesn't matter. Think on the scale of 200 million. The cost structures don't even resemble each other.

200 million cars? Teslas made 3 million cars total with sales declining, now they’re going to build 197 million more (to whom?) and they’ll all be robotaxis? That is literally delusional.

They make 1.7m cars _every year_ right now, and growing quickly as you pointed out with their total. They don't need to sell the cars; they can run the Robotaxi network themselves. They'll take Uber's entire market and grow it substantially as well.