Take a look at this.
A Tesla Robotaxi in Austin pauses, seems to reconsider a right-hand turn through some bollards, and then decides: I’m just gonna send it.
Tesla Robotaxi Rams through several Bollards and keeps going.
by u/bladerskb in SelfDrivingCars
“You Can’t Go This Way! Don’t Do That! Holy Cow!”
The vehicle is operating unsupervised. The passenger is livestreaming from the front passenger seat, which is where Tesla used to put its human safety monitor during the early Austin Robotaxi rollout.
And our passenger realizes what’s happening considerably faster than the car does.
“You can’t go this way! Don’t do that! Holy cow!”
The Robotaxi proceeds to mow through several flexible posts and just… keeps going. The car doesn’t appear to detect the bollard visually, despite being parked only feet away during broad daylight. The car then doesn’t detect the impact of multiple accelerating hits to the bumper.
A perfectly garbage performance.
Tesla: “Impeccable Safety Record”
This is particularly funny because Tesla discussed Robotaxi safety just a few weeks ago during its latest earnings call, on July 22.
Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy called the program’s safety record “impeccable,” saying the company had accumulated more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation with “zero notable incidents.”
Well.
I suppose we’ll have to ask Tesla what constitutes a “notable” incident. When last I checked, the Robotaxi program was up to 17 crashes with at least one hospital visit.
I will say, from the passenger seat, this incident feels pretty notable.
“That Was Not Good… At All”
This Tesla fan narrating is probably the first completely honest thing I’ve heard during one of these early Tesla Robotaxi livestreams.
And look, early autonomous vehicles are going to do weird things. That’s why you test them, ideally with a human safety monitor.
But “impeccable” is an awfully strong adjective for a driving robot that can apparently just ignore a small forest of bright, reflective traffic posts.
Especially because this isn’t some bizarre edge case, this is literally what bike lane protection looks like in my city.
Reddit Sleuth Finds the Intersection
A very helpful Reddit commenter tracked down the intersection, and it looks like this:
Those posts are not subtle.
The bollards are white. They’re reflective. They’re surrounded by pavement markings specifically channeling traffic away from them. To a human driver, the message is immediately apparent:
Can’t park here, mate.
More importantly, the Robotaxi appears to hesitate before going through them.
We obviously cannot know what the software was “thinking,” but from the outside it sure looks like the car encounters something it isn’t confident about, pauses, and then chooses the funniest possible answer.
The road markings and bendy barriers together are about as unambiguous a physical “THIS IS NOT YOUR TURN LANE” message as road infrastructure gets.
And the Tesla drives through them anyway.
So, anyway, while the end result here is some sweaty palms, it does beg the question… is this tech really ready for unsupervised deployment?
