Tesla Robotaxi Service Begins Next Week In Austin. Is Full Self Driving Finally Ready? – CleanTechnica

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After nearly ten years of promises, Elon Musk says full self driving is finally ready for prime time, as a small fleet of Tesla Model Ys equipped with the latest FSD software upgrades will begin robotaxi service in Austin, Texas next week. The cars will be geofenced, meaning they will be limited to driving on streets in certain areas of the city — the safest ones, Musk told CNBC recently — but it is unclear what that means, exactly.

He was at pains to say the cars are “not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident [they’re] going to do well with that intersection, or it’ll just take a route around that intersection,” Musk said. “We’re going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment, as we should be. It would be foolish not to be.”

Readers may recall an article recently that described the experiences of Lloyd Lee and Alistair Barr of Business Insider who used a Waymo robotaxi and Barr’s personal Tesla to make a journey from Twin Peaks into the city and back. At one intersection, the Tesla ignored a red light. It also wandered into a bicycle lane briefly. Fortunately, there was no cross traffic in the intersection or bicycle riders in the bike lane at the time. The Waymo car avoided that intersection entirely by taking a different route.

According to TechCrunch, the Tesla Model Y robotaxi fleet will have Full Self Driving Unsupervised software installed. All privately owned Teslas have Full Self Driving (Supervised) software, which requires drivers to remain vigilant and ready to take control of the car if needed. But the cars in Austin won’t really be unsupervised, as a team of Tesla employees will monitor them continuously and be able to control them remotely if necessary. There will be no human drivers inside the cars. The Cybercab, if and when it arrives, will have no steering wheel or pedals.

“I think it’s prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things are going well, and then scale it up proportionate to how well we see it’s doing,” Musk said. “Prudent” is a word we didn’t know Elon even had in his vocabulary.

Waymo has an operations center staffed by people who monitor their self driving cars and provide guidance as needed, but those people have no direct control over the cars. Instead they communicate with the self driving system in a series of questions and answers to give it proper context and help it solve problems it encounters along the route.

Tesla FSD Challenges

It is one thing to navigate city streets at 35 mph or less. It is quite another thing to drive on a busy highway at 65 mph or more. Bloomberg today has a report that explains why Full Self Driving may not be ready for prime time, either in supervised or unsupervised mode. According to reporters Dana Hull and Craig Trudell, in November, 2023, an accident on a highway between Phoenix and Flagstaff was blocked by a traffic accident. To make matters worse, the sun was setting at the time, making visibility for cars traveling west extremely difficult.

Bloomberg has obtained video footage downloaded by Arizona police from a Tesla Model Y driven by Karl Stock, who was using FSD at the time. I have searched in vain for a way to embed that video into this story, but without success. Maybe that is for the best. The video is horrific. If you are able to access the Bloomberg story and watch the video, be sure to be sitting down first.

The in-car video shows many vehicles with the hazard lights on in the breakdown lane as the Tesla motors serenely on at a steady 65 mph. As the car rounds a bend, the cameras are blinded by the setting sun. We see a person on the left of the high speed lane frantically waving something to get the drivers attention. The Tesla steers left then right as it comes upon a black Toyota 4Runner stopped partly in the high speed lane with all its doors open. Standing there is Johna Story, who stares in horror at the onrushing Tesla just before it runs her down. She died at the scene.

“Sorry everything happened so fast,” Stock wrote in a witness statement submitted to the police. “There were cars stopped in front of me and by the time I saw them I had no place to go to avoid them.” Stock was not cited by the police for his part in the tragedy. While we know there is a lag between when a human becomes aware of  a dangerous situation and retakes control of a vehicle, those of us here at CleanTechnica have a question or two.

If you are driving along and see a line of cars with their hazard lights flashing stopped on the side of the road, wouldn’t you at least take your foot off the throttle? Question 2 — how can a computer system that touts its ability to drive an automobile more safely than a human driver not notice the cars on the side of the road and stopped cars ahead? We know our readers will be asking the same questions and we look forward to reading their answers.

Hull and Trudell attempted to contact Tesla before publishing their story but got the usual stonewall response from Tesla. You can read the full crash report from the Arizona authorities here. Bryant Smith, a lawyer and engineer who advises cities, states, and countries on emerging transportation technologies, told the reporters that Tesla’s push to deploy driverless cars may be premature. “They are claiming they will be imminently able to do something — true automated driving — that all evidence suggests they still can’t do safely.”

Gaming The System

NHTSA had a standing order in effect requiring all crashes involving advanced driver assistance system be reported to the federal government. Despite that order, Tesla waited seven months before reporting the tragedy to NHTSA. Subsequent to the crash in Arizona, a Tesla Model 3 with Full Self-Driving engaged crashed in Nipton, California. Two months after that, another Model 3 crashed in Red Mills, Virginia, followed by another crash two months after that in Collinsville, Ohio. “In all four incidents, the collisions occurred in conditions that reduced roadway visibility, such as sun glare, fog or airborne dust,” Bloomberg reports.

In October, 2024 just prior to the last US election, NHTSA initiated a defect investigation into the Tesla FSD system. A day later, Musk posted on his personal anti-social media site that Washington had become “an ever-increasing ocean of brake pedals stopping progress.” During the Tesla Q3 earnings call a week later, Musk called for federal approval of autonomous vehicle systems to take precedence over regulations in individual states. “If there’s a Department of Government Efficiency, I’ll try to help make that happen,” he said.

And so he did. The failed current president chose Sean Duffy, whose only credentials include a stint in an MTV reality show about cars and another as a talking head on the Faux News comedy channel. On May 20, Duffy visited the Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, where he said, “We’re here because we’re thrilled about the future of autonomous vehicles.” While he said safety is key, he also touted the need to “let innovators innovate.”

We have to wonder if Duffy might change his mind if he was the one standing near a wreck on the highway when a Tesla using FSD came hurtled toward him. Probably not. When you drink deeply of the Kool Aid, you are happy to die for the cause. Reportedly all the victims of Jim Jones death cult in Guyana died with smiles on their faces.

Musk insists on using only cameras for his self driving cars. Everyone else uses cameras plus radar and/or lidar. “Elon Musk has bet the entire company on this philosophy that current Tesla vehicles are capable of being a robotaxi,” Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, told Bloomberg. “We know the FSD system is camera-based, and sun glare can inhibit camera-based operations.” Not so, Musk insisted during the most recent earnings call in April of this year. Pressed on the issue by Colin Langan, a Wells Fargo analyst, Musk said:

“Actually, it does not blind the camera. We use an approach, which is direct photon count. So, when you see a processed image, so the image that goes from the sort of photon counter — the silicon photon counter — that then goes through a digital signal processor or image signal processor, that’s normally what happens. And then the image that you see looks all washed out, because if you point the camera at the sun, the post-processing of the photon counting washes things out.

“It actually adds noise. So, part of the breakthrough that we made some time ago was to go with direct photon counting and bypass the image signal processor. And then you can drive pretty much straight at the sun, and you can also see in what appears to be the blackest of nights. And then glare and fog, we can see as well as people can, probably better, but I’d say probably slightly better than people, well, than the average person anyway.”

Sam Abuelsamid, a former vehicle-development engineer who’s now vice president of Telemetry, a Detroit-based communications firm, told Bloomberg, “At some point, you have to process the signal. There has to be an image processor somewhere.” Perhaps Abuelsamiod is simply ill informed or perhaps Musk is engaging in his usual hyperbole. Readers are free to make up their own minds on that issue.

What is not in dispute, however is that Johna Story did not give her consent to be part of a Tesla FSD beta trial. Musk assumes no responsibility for her horrific death and doesn’t seem to be able to understand why anyone would think he should. That is the take away from this story and it is why some are less than thrilled at the idea of Teslas with no human driver behind the wheel cruising the streets of Austin starting next week.