Tesla joins Austin's self-driving race with launch of Robotaxi service

Austin is known for live music, Texas’ premier public university and being home to tech companies. It is also becoming a laboratory for autonomous vehicles.

 

Driverless Waymo taxis, owned by Google’s parent company, regularly drop off diners at Austin’s famous barbecue joints. Box-shaped, four-wheeled robots operated by Avride, a start-up working with Uber Eats, deliver Thai takeout to customers downtown. Zoox, owned by Amazon, and Volkswagen are separately testing autonomous taxis here.

 

Tesla, the electric car company based in Austin, recently joined the party, rolling out self-driving Model Ys ahead of a taxi service that is expected to begin offering rides as soon as Sunday. The vehicles, which the company calls Robotaxis, are part of an audacious effort by Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, to leap ahead of Waymo, which dominates a nascent business that someday could be worth tens of billions of dollars and perhaps much more. But the busy streets of Austin show that Tesla will face significant competition and other challenges. It will have to engage in painstaking experimentation to perfect its technology, which some autonomous-driving experts have criticised for having fewer safeguards than those operated by Waymo and other companies. 

 

Also, Tesla is starting from behind. Waymo has been driving paying passengers for years in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and started its commercial service in Austin in March in partnership with Uber. Waymo said on Wednesday that it was applying for a permit from New York City to offer rides with a person behind the wheel. A change in state law would be required for fully autonomous rides.

 

A small fleet of Tesla Robotaxis will begin carrying passengers in Austin on June 22, Musk said on X last week but added the company may delay the start of the service. But analysts expect the cars will be available only to company employees or invited guests. The service will probably not be available to the general public for several months, analysts said.

 

Tesla is adapting its most advanced driver assistance software, already offered as an option on the cars it sells, to operate without human intervention. If this approach works, the company could quickly roll out driverless taxis around the world.

 

Musk has said a software update could allow hundreds of thousands or even millions of existing Teslas to operate as autonomous taxis, making cheap driverless rides ubiquitous.

 

But the approach Tesla is taking is unusual. Waymo and other companies working to offer self-driving taxi services have been developing their technologies for years, painstakingly mapping streets and training their software to avoid hitting pedestrians, cyclists, garbage trucks, fire engines and all manner of other things found on public roads.

 

“FSD is an immature system,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York, referring to what Tesla calls its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software.

 

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Another challenge for Tesla is that its self-driving system is under investigation by federal officials.

 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into whether Tesla’s technology was responsible for crashes in conditions where the road was obscured by fog, dust, bright light or darkness. One crash led to the death of a pedestrian.