Despite an immense push by CEO Elon Musk, Tesla is still struggling to gain much traction with its Robotaxi service. The EV maker launched the service last summer, with the mercurial CEO promising that over 1,000 fully autonomous cabs would be roaming city streets within “months.”
Fast forward over a year, and Tesla is still nowhere near even the 100 mark. Cars are getting stuck, requiring plenty of human supervision, and just narrowly avoiding disaster.
The service also happens to be mind-bogglingly slow compared to a cab driven by a human. As Electrek reports, Reggie Overton, who styles himself as a “Tesla ambassador” — as far as we can tell, he has no actual affiliation with the company — had such a frustrating experience riding one of the company’s Robotaxis that he took to social media to rage against the experience.
He was trying to cover just 2.3 miles in Austin, Texas — an easy trip that the vehicle estimated would take an astonishing hour and six minutes.
“I couldn’t believe it, so I called support,” Overton wrote in a widely-shared tweet recalling his “horrible experience.” “They assured me it was a bug, and shortly afterward, the estimate dropped to 16 minutes but the actual route never changed.”
“About two minutes later, the estimated arrival time jumped back up to 57 minutes,” he recalled.
After yet another call to support, Overton wrote that “we had to change our destination, get out of the Robotaxi, and call an Uber to get where we were originally trying to go.”
“For a 2.3-mile trip, this was an incredibly frustrating experience especially when support had no way to correct what was clearly a routing problem,” Overton argued. “I didn’t even get a refund.”
After the post went viral, Tesla decided to provide a refund after all, while vowing to “continue to improve the rider experience at every level” — a rare admission of weakness, especially considering Tesla doesn’t even have a public relations department.
As Electrek points out, a different loyal customer, who goes by TexasTSLA, has also been having trouble getting to his destination using Robotaxis. He’s been forced to walk after a vehicle dropped him off “three miles away from my car because it was too late at night.” That’s despite him calling a cab before 10 pm, when the service shuts down.
He also been passed up on several times by Robotaxis, forcing him to once again stretch his legs.
“Good thing is we got a lot of steps in,” he tweeted.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s biggest competitor, Waymo, is running laps around Musk’s EV maker. Ridership has been skyrocketing, reaching 500,000 paid rides a week across ten US cities as of March.
More on robotaxis: Tesla Robotaxi With No Driver Spotted Smashing Through Traffic Barriers