Was it really a surprise that Musks Robotaxi launch didn’t deliver?

You could say that Elon Musks bet on the Tesla Robotaxi service launch in Austin Texas this week, went exactly how you’d expect. At least when you put in into the perspective of Musks way of over promising and under delivering. If you put it into the perspective of Wall Streets analysts and investors, who just refuse to learn from previous mistakes, the launch couldn’t have been worse.

Soon after Robotaxi’s started taking the first customers in the back seat, video’s started to emerge of Tesla’s doing weird stuff. You can check out autonomous Tesla’s, while under supervision from someone in the passenger seat, swerve over intersections, driving erratically and doing some random braking tests around police cars.

The behavior of traffic laws disobeying Robotaxi’s got so bad that the NHTSA (The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)[launched an investigation into Musks new project.

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Everyone on planet earth could see this coming, except Mister Musk and Wall Street investors. The stock took a nose dive upon learning the fact that Robotaxi’s still had someone from Tesla in the car to supervise the rides and take control when a self driving Model Y inevitably tried to take somebody out or got into problems with gates and chains.

But if you know a bit more about the Full Self-Driving functionality of Tesla’s, you probably know it’s not nearly capable of driving fully autonomous. If you keep track of the beta-testers and their publications, you can see it’s not ready for public use, whatever the fanboys tell you in those video’s.

You can argue that Tesla has the most data it can train their Self Driving AI on, which probably is true. It’s a valid point in itself, but it’s a sad fact that it’s mostly used to counter the obvious technical shortcomings of the cars. By that I mean it almost exclusively relies on camera’s Which produce images of subpar quality. It’s like driving around with foggy glasses on and expecting to drive safely.

I’ve driven several Tesla’s over the years. When they just emerged on the Dutch market, I was genuinely impressed with how the cars preformed on auto-pilot (Full Self-Driving was and is still unavailable here). It was amazing to see how much Tesla’s could detect. But since then technology has improved drastically, and it seems Tesla hasn’t been keeping up. They’ve gotten better, but different brands outperform Tesla, even if it’s just because they see the value in investing in better hardware like LiDAR to help the car ‘see’ better.

All this to say that it still surprises me that the experts in the business keep getting caught off guard when stuff like this happens. Or maybe it’s just a for the realists on Wall Street to take some value out of Tesla, which is still one of the most over valued stocks in the world right now. In that case, I’m kind of disappointed they only managed to knock 15 bucks of the stock price.

Just to be sure, I’m going to say it again: No, ’Full Self-Driving’ on a Tesla doesn’t mean it can fully drive itself. It still needs human supervision. And: No: a ‘Tesla Robotaxi’ is not a robot in the shape of a taxi that can autonomously drive you around town. It still needs human supervision. And: No, you can’t trust Elon Musk will keep his promises. He has never done that up until now, so it’s stupid to expect he will suddenly change that.