The First Week of Tesla's Robotaxis Has Been a Disaster

While autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo and Baidu clock hundreds of thousands of self-driving taxi trips, Tesla is lagging far behind.

We're now one week into the EV giant's robotaxi pilot in Austin — a program Elon Musk has teased for over a decade — and it's going about as horribly as expected. Citizens who've braved the robotaxi program have flooded social media this week with videos and tales of their harrowing experiences.

The footage ranges from one Tesla veering into an oncoming lane to another "dropping off" a rider in the middle of a busy intersection. Yet another clip shows a robotaxi careening at nearly twice the posted speed limit.

A number of videos capture the robotaxi's "phantom braking" phenomenon, where the vehicles hammer the brake pedal for inscrutable reasons. For example, one influencer recorded her robotaxi slamming on the brakes without an obstacle in sight, hard enough to cause her to drop her phone.

One post on the Austin subreddit claims a robotaxi hit a parked car while navigating a lot at at local pizza joint called Home Slice.

The issues are so numerous that federal regulators got involved just one day after the pilot went live.

Though companies like Waymo have had their fair share of roadside issues, they've also been much more rigorously tested, with reams of rider data to back their fleets up.

Importantly, the vast majority of companies developing self-driving vehicles use LiDAR systems to scan the car's surroundings. That approach is much more expensive, but also much safer than Tesla's, which relies on standard cameras that often get confused and covered in gunk.

For Tesla, the robotaxi play is arguably a last-ditch effort to save the company from financial ruin. It's currently one of the most valuable tech companies in the world, a status it attained with generous taxpayer subsidies, and which is now in jeopardy as worldwide sales continue to plummet for the fifth month in a row.

If robotaxis don't work out in the long term, there are vanishingly few revenue streams left for Tesla to tap. Even the company's beloved EV tax credits — the generous government handouts that propelled Tesla to the top of the charts in the first place — are under threat thanks to Donald Trump's budget cuts.

Given its disaster of a first week, it seems the question now isn't if Tesla will fall — but how far, as it oozes revenue into the gutter.

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