Whether due to consumer backlash or an aging EV lineup, or both, Tesla sales have again seen a global plunge, this time 13 percent last quarter compared to the previous year—proof that the electric automaker hasn’t yet turned around a dismal year that saw public opinion of controversial CEO Elon Musk plummet. It could mean Tesla faces a second straight year of falling sales.
And yet: Tesla is still the world’s most valuable automaker by market capitalization, worth some $990 billion. At least some of that market confidence is likely traced to the happenings of June 22, when Tesla finally began allowing paying passengers to ride its autonomous vehicle service in Austin, Texas.
The service rollout has been fairly smooth. If the metric for success is “no crashes,” mission accomplished: There have been no public reports of crashes or fender-benders involving the robotaxis. The select few riders who have been allowed inside them have praised the service online, which for now costs just $4.20 a ride. (The price seems to be a weed joke.)
But there are plenty of caveats. For one thing, the program’s “early riders” appear to be Tesla influencers, online content creators who have financial stakes in the company or who run media businesses that tend to cheerlead for Tesla and/or electric vehicles. Tesla has not said when it will open the service to members of the public. (The company, which disbanded its PR team in October 2020, did not respond to any of WIRED’s questions.) For another, Tesla’s area of operations is notably smaller than Alphabet subsidiary Waymo’s, which began offering robotaxi service in the city through the Uber app in March.
For one more, there are plenty of humans involved in this driverless service. Tesla has a safety monitor in the front passenger seat of its robotaxis, who, according to online videos, seems poised to intervene if the technology makes a mistake. And Tesla has been less than transparent about its use of human teleoperators, who can either remotely drive or remotely assist its driverless technology. (The former is likely much safer than the latter, experts say, but Tesla hasn’t said which approach it uses.)
Missed Milestone
“Tesla has what I call the trifecta of babysitting going on right now,” says Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University, and has herself been the subject of Musk’s displeasure. The human contributions likely make Tesla’s service much safer, she says—something for which the automaker should be praised. In fact, keeping babysitting humans in the drivers’ seat is exactly what rivals Waymo and Zoox did in the early phases of their testing. (Waymo now offers robotaxi service in five cities; Zoox has said it will start service in Las Vegas this year.) “I want to encourage them to keep doing that,” she says.
But, for Cummings, the choice is likely evidence that Tesla is behind its competitors. “If learning to deploy a self-driving car system was grades K through 12, Tesla is in first grade,” she says. “Everything we're seeing in Texas suggests significant immaturity in self-driving operations.”
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.”