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This Is Why Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Needed Human Babysitters
On-board helpers, bad-weather suspensions, but no crashes. WIRED asked experts to grade Tesla’s Austin autonomous taxi service—and, crucially, how to know if the system is safe.
This means, too, that Tesla hasn’t hit the milestone Musk promised back in January, when he told investors that the company would launch “unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June…no one in the car.” One YouTuber uploaded a video showing a robotaxi “phantom braking”—suddenly coming to a stop for no apparent reason—a phenomenon that’s also been flagged by hundreds of users of Tesla’s less-advanced Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature and investigated by the federal government. Full Self-Driving (Supervised) requires a human driver to intervene when needed, and it appears robotaxi is the same right now, says Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety.
Or read this on Wired
