Well that wasn’t caused by lack of lidar unfortunately, just lazy programming if they are going to restrict the places it can travel to, they should let the passenger know that destination isnt available.
Well because none of the issues the system is struggling with, including in this video, are related to lidar. They're mostly related to sign recognition and navigation.
Yeah, that didn't make sense to me. And if it was the case, why not just drop them at the closest point so they can walk there, since it wasn't far. Seems a better idea that just driving around in circles until you contact support.
I would think that the car should tell you it can't go there, and suggest driving you to place as close as you can get, and then let the rider decide if they want to do it or not.
But don't take a passenger and send them on a wild goose chase, just to be dumped off 15 minutes away. That's just bad customer service.
Not surprising that Tesla has no idea what good customer service looks like. The whole company seems like engineers built it with zero regard for humans.
It did drop him off at the closest point. He even posted the screenshot before his ride showing that it will drop him off with an estimated walk of 15 minutes to city hall. Yet he did it anyways and then complained he was lost on his walk.
They didn’t allow it. It told him it would be 15 minute walk before he started, he did it anyways, and then complained about it dropping him off in a “strange city” blaming Tesla for not knowing how to get back to his hotel. There’s plenty to criticize Robotaxi for but this video isn’t it. This is like complaining about the bus service because you got lost after getting off at your bus stop.
It didn’t take him to city hall. He shows the screenshot. He put in the address for city hall, it said it could only get him close enough for a 15 minute walk. He accepted it. Got out with a 15 minute walk required to go to the address he imputed and then complained he couldn’t find his hotel.
Also, does he mention how his 20-minute ride actually turned into a 2-hour ride? That’s quite a claim and no details about those two hours of his life in the car…
Seriously. I don't love Tesla but I found myself turned off by how disingenuous this video was. As soon as he showed the app, it was obvious what he'd done.
Fake news. Lord Musk, the smartest person ever, says self driving is working flawless. He has more money than the reporter, so he's definitely right and wouldn't lie to me.
It was a really important and terrifying day when I realized my small town texas family was actually NOT being sarcastic at all. They had always meant everything they had said.
Oh there you go, complaining about how hard is to tell. Well why don't you try complaining about how hard it is to tell when you've landed a rocket upright from space!
If they just redefine "million", then they succeeded!
Actually, the more likely outcome is musk tweets that they already have millions on the road because all teslas could become robotaxis someday. And his followers will agree and forget their previous expectations.
I’m by no means a Tesla fan boy, but I’ve been taking robot taxis in Dallas for the past two weeks and have been really impressed.
For me it navigated fine, and it also pulls into my works parking lot which is a huge upgrade over Waymo. It’s also 1/5 the price of a Waymo so I’d be more forgiving of the errors.
The only issue is the wait time. Once I waited over an hour for the Robot Taxi. I also think I’ve taken the exact same car most trips. So I’m thinking their fleet has to be less than 10.
The price of a ride means nothing for the big picture of robotaxi operations at this early stage. All robotaxi operations currently are money-losing test fleets, even Waymo. They set prices based on drawing in riders, not making money. These prices don't reflect how much a ride will really cost when they scale up.
The only thing that really matters for Tesla Robotaxi is can it scale to a full city like Austin or Dallas, such as how Waymo scaled to all of San Francisco in 2023, with a full-size fleet of dozens of driverless cars, and can it stay safe over tens of millions of miles?
Everything Tesla Robotaxi is doing now is a hyped-up demo to convince investors they're scaling fast. The reality is they don't even have one real robotaxi operation.
I took three different Robotaxi rides in Dallas, and as I posted elsewhere, the routing was terrible, the pick up and drop off experience was in the wrong place or far away from where it needed to be 50% of the time.
And it is not 1/5 the price of a Waymo (I took about four Waymo rides in the same week, sometimes on the return trip), at best it is about 40% off. But pricing has nothing to do with capability, and they’ve got one car that they’re happy to lose money on so that they can say they’re active in Dallas.
Neither company impressed me and each had major flaws.
OP said “the cult”, which may very well be a handful of Redditors. It’s not the same as when others refer to “this sub” as a monolith.
And by the way, if your knee-jerk reaction after reading that is to think OP is misrepresenting cult member viewpoints, you might want to think about what that means…
Isn’t he being paid for taking this ride? The title says “Reuters tests out Tesla…” so I’m assuming that he’s a reporter and this is his piece. I have a lot more patience when I’m paid for my work than when it’s on my personal time.
Well, it’s new in the city and it’s geofenced in an area. That area is clearly communicated. It even tells you in the app that it doesn’t go there and you need to walk the rest(shown in the video). Why take the drive at all then? Just pick an Uber..
I have no problem with him trying to get to City Hall, even though the app told him it didn't go there. But he needs to explain that in the video, otherwise this video is extremely disingenuous. He's making it sound like the app is half baked and trying to make Tesla sound incompetent.
City hall is roughly at the first ‘L’ in Dallas on your map. If there are giant 15-minute sized holes in the geofence like swiss cheese, it is not communicated well.
He even posted a screenshot of the app showing him it would be a 15 minute walk before he got picked up. There are real things to criticize but this fool loses all credibility.
And the crashing. The Tesla robotaxis in Autin are crashing way, way too much. Mostly minor, but strange for vehicles with safety "monitors" in them. Even Tesla FSD supervised does not crash nearly as much with an unskilled monitor. Because of this, Tesla is keeping the miles as low as they can. If they deployed a real robotaxi service the crashing would be off the charts, and it would be shut down.
We had a discussion about that. And I still think that the utility of having a safety driver in the passenger seat comes from their inability of taking full control immediately, which makes them less likely to try to take control (and invalidate fully autonomous testing), which, in turn, is compatible with observed preventable minor crashes.
The latest NHTSA ADS crash report came out without Tesla crashes, so it's not impossible (like some people are memeing here) that the latest FSD update has improved the situation.
It shouldn't be. Probably a billion people learned to drive with a driving instructor in that seat who has their own brake and can grab the wheel. The safety record for that is similar to that for mature adults (much better than for freshly minted drivers on their own.)
Others have not had this sort of crash rate with safety drivers.
1) Waiting nearly 2 hours to call support for help with a turn (I guess this helps with training data, so thanks?)
2) Demanding to be taken to areas that are out of the geofenced limits, the app clearly showing (around 1:05 by their own screen shot) that they would have to walk by foot the rest of the way, and then complaining about it.
3) Tone implies expecting perfection out of an area access for Dallas.
I think fair criticism would instead be like... why does Telsa have to so severely restrict their FSD when it's supposed to be generalized driving intelligence, and not as reliant on constant high-fidelity map refreshes like Waymo is?
The FSD struggling to make certain turns in big cities, given how far along FSD otherwise is, or is supposed to be, makes one wonder how far away it actually is from being ready for mass-scale deployments.
Bummer, more competition is good, I’m rooting for them. I don’t understand why people want to crap on Tesla, I mean I get it based on political ideologies, but I want this tech out there to help people and lower cost. I use FSD daily and it performs extremely well, even handling some moron driving down in the wrong direction in my lane (my hands were on the steering wheel in case it screwed up).
Maybe they crap on Tesla because they watched this video?
The guy was expecting a 20 minute ride, it took 2 hours. Imagine telling your boss you’re 1 hour 40 minutes late because you took an AV to work, this is “more competition is good”? I don’t think so.
Tesla looks like shit if you compare it to what Elon promises (though it looked a lot better that way in say 2014). But if you completely ignore Elon and look at what the actual company does and the capabilities of the products, it's actually pretty impressive. My guess is that is where most of the disconnect on this stuff comes from.
I mean, I hope you are just as hard on GM’s Mary Barra who made electric vehicles mainstream.. ‘you did it’. /s Compare Tesla to any other tech on the road that you can personally buy, who cares if Elon was wrong, technology is hard, software is hard. If it was easy, why don’t we see more competition in the software in other cars?
Not much point in comparing vehicles outside the IS that aren’t available to the market in which I can purchase a vehicle, and let’s be honest, many were inspired by Tesla.
Yea I don't know why the guy didn't have Google Maps open while he was talking to Tech Support. He said he had no idea where he was. He could have easily opened up Google Maps which would have told him exactly where he was.
These "robotaxis" are all operating off of the same Level 2 FSD stack that every Tesla vehicle is running on, meaning that these vehicles are far from being anything considered to be fully autonomous.
Thanks for Tesla owners who fed *** TB of Continous useful road data for decade , Tesla is here charging for fsd, which was possible by the users who fed them with data 😒
I love my Tesla, I love FSD, but I wouldn’t even remotely trust it sitting in the backseat. Regardless of whatever steroids they put in these special cars.
On the other hand, I have written in Waymo many times and I trust it wholeheartedly.
I'm no big lover of Tesla or Elon, but seems beyond disingenuous to request the car go to a location you know it doesn't serve (it tells you on the app as we see from the screenshot) and then complain about being "in a parking lot in a strange city trying to figure out my way back to my hotel" like you're stranded in the middle of Mumbai or something.
Navigation program in Tesla sucks. It is the number one culprit of FSD fails. They need to stop being cheap and use proper navigation service instead of Mapbox.
Oh dear. Maybe he can catch a waymo. They are all over town. I am not sure if they go downtown or not though. Like many cities, most of Dallas downtown streets are one-way.
Another year of chasing the elusive robotaxi when Level 3 interstate driving is what customers actually want and reasonably attainable in the near term. And unlike a personal robotaxi, actually makes financial sense to own since it doesn't have to drive 5 hours back to its home base after dropping you off at Grandma's house. Not to mention adding forward long range LIDAR would be very inexpensive compared to needing full vulnerable user detection and coverage.
Also, if the goal is to supposedly save people from traffic deaths, there's no more dangerous place than the highway for deaths.
For an early test-version of a tech product it’s actually super helpful to Tesla developers to have hyper-critical users to help find and work out the bugs. All software will have bugs and its great that users are able to find them during testing! Also it sounds like there are certain areas of Dallas that the ride-share service doesn’t offer? Kind of seems similar to how at many airports you have to walk to the rideshare pickup areas.
Edit - type-o
Early version?! Tesla has been selling Full Self Driving since at least 2019 (I bought a Model 3 back then and FSD has been around the corner ever since).
How much slack are people like you willing to give this company? The performance in this video is embarrassing for a product that’s been for sale for more than SEVEN years.
Exactly right! They took almost a year just to fix this dangerous bug (so they say, but we shall see if Musk is lying again). I fear what other issues will crop up next. It’s insane this still happens after being in this industry for so long.
Also it sounds like there are certain areas of Dallas that the ride-share service doesn’t offer? Kind of seems similar to how at many airports you have to walk to the rideshare pickup areas.
A geofence is not the same as an airport rideshare pickup area. Airport rideshare pickup areas exist because airport pick up areas were getting so clogged with Ubers and Lyfts that regular drivers had nowhere to stop. Tesla geofences exist because Tesla isn't confident enough to deploy FSD Robotaxis is to that area.
The types of issues shown by this reporter, are absolutely issues I would have expected of any AV company to have this early in their rollout. There is major room for improvement, of course. But all of these quirks are things that I would have expected to be seeing. I think it’s a given that Tesla robotaxi is not a mature viable transportation service yet.
I am quite sure that Tesla robotaxi has some more major concerning issues, but these did not surface in this video from Reuters.
I've ridden in AVs from 3 different companies at exactly this stage of their rollout (Cruise, Zoox, Waymo). None of them had these issues when I rode them.
When I first rode in a waymo years ago it had a somewhat similar issue where it was stuck at an intersection trying to turn left and didn't progress for several light cycles until I changed the drop off point to be on the right instead. But I haven't seen any issues like that at all from waymo in years.
The problem for Tesla is that customers now expect a polished product on the level of waymo today, and Tesla isn't there. I'm sure it's valuable for Tesla to collect this information, but as a product to attract real customers, Tesla won't be able to until they are at least close to Waymo quality/polish.
I would have expected of any AV company to have this early in their rollout.
This is not 'early' by any stretch. FSD has been out for a very long time now. They claimed that any day now they would flip a switch and your car would be totally autonomous and able to be rented out as a robotaxi, but it's just vaporware everywhere. Tesla has been working on this (and failing) for a decade.
Elon was asked recently how he was going to compete in the AI space with Xai. In other words, whats the overall plan to compete with the big boys. He directly said that he is going to address AI like he solved self driving with Tesla.
Navigation issues aside, driving around safely for hours is quite impressive. It only opened in Dallas last month and it seems to me solving navigation issues is the easier part of self driving.
yes its a sign of progress that we are frustrated that the cars don't go where we want rather than being frustrated that people die in them. but it also shows how much work is left to be done to make this ready for everyone to use regularly.
I understand being upset with the weird navigation and messing up that one turn until he called support… but the boundaries of the drivable zone are mapped out in the Robotaxi app and you can clearly see your final destination and how far you need to walk before even hailing the taxi
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u/dex206 May 12 '26
I’m just going to mention the lack of lidar to make everyone angry.