Tesla didn't remove Robotaxi safety monitor – just moved them to a trailing car

Posted by usefulposter 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by netsharc 1 day ago

Why not have the driver ahead to point out any issues on the road to the car behind. Call it Potemkin Self-Driving.

Comment by BurningFrog 22 hours ago

I'm unimpressed. What they've concretely seen is black Teslas driving behind two robotaxis.

They spin that into a viral story that the safety monitor was just moved to a following car. That might be true, but like the story says, it makes no sense.

So maybe there just happened to be two other Teslas in Austin traffic. It is the most sold car model in the country.

Comment by steeve 1 day ago

i can't help but think of the scammy communication around this on X. and the actual need to be deceitful about it.

oh how low the mighty have fallen

Comment by netsharc 1 day ago

In legalese it's true... the tweet was "Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.".

An analogy would be if a husband came home from a job trip in Denver and his wife accused him of cheating, and his response is "I wasn't cheating on you in Denver!", because he cheated on her in Boulder.

"No safety monitor in the car". Somehow the image of Mr. Bean driving his car from an armchair mounted on top of it comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVSLLWXdKV0

Comment by mgiannopoulos 13 hours ago

Waymo had chase cars as well at the beginning. This isn’t something strange. They are not there to tele-operate the car.

Comment by ben_w 1 day ago

Fallen implies they were ever high. Unfortunately the revelations regarding the "Paint it Black" self-driving demo demonstrate a history of dishonesty, that this isn't new.

Comment by kotaKat 1 day ago

I’m still surprised they don’t rig up an in-roof Starlink multi-beam array or something and just set the cars up for remote driving somewhere and just rely on tele-operation to fill the gaps (ala Vay, Phantom Auto, et al).

At least that level of cheating would have been more impressive than a safety monitor hanging onto the passenger window switch as a killswitch.

(Then maybe in the future, your remote tele-operation drivers are replaced with ‘the AI’ running in ‘the cloud’ instead over the same remote control link? Boom, I’ve also just solved the hardware upgrade issues…)