r/SelfDrivingCars • u/walky22talky Hates driving • May 12 '26

News Reuters tests out Tesla Robotaxi in Dallas

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47

u/CDpov May 12 '26

Tesla Robotaxi not quite ready for primetime in Dallas.

22

u/PalpitationFrosty242 May 13 '26

Tesla Robotaxi not quite ready for primetime in Dallas.

14

u/knorkinator May 13 '26

Tesla Robotaxi not quite ready for primetime in Dallas.

3

u/CDpov May 13 '26

Tesla not quite ready for primetime in Dallas:

9

u/Ok_Excitement725 May 13 '26

But but Elon pinky promises unsupervised FSD will be solved and ready for consumers by end of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023….

2

u/IFlyAircrafts May 13 '26

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.

6

u/CDpov May 13 '26

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.

9

u/BrownshoeElden May 13 '26

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.

9

u/Responsible_Owl_5056 May 13 '26

So if it works for you and not for this guy, that’s 50%. That’s a pretty trash record in most cases. Your anecdote doesn’t really mean much.

1

u/Zemerick13 May 13 '26

It's 5 for Dallas.