How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale

Summary

Tesla CEO Elon Musk launched his Austin robotaxi service nearly a month ago to great fanfare. But FSD Community Tracker host Elias Martinez argues everything that has happened since explains why the service has not scaled—it remains nowhere near safe enough to remove human safety monitors, as proven by a near accident.The very day Elon Musk expanded the boundaries of his three-week-old autonomous ride hailing service in Austin, Joe Tegtmeyer’s Tesla tried to illegally run a railroad crossing just as a locomotive approached.“The robotaxi did not see that, and the safety observer had to stop the vehicle until the train had passed. So there’s a little bit of work that still needs to be polished up with the software, but otherwise it’s been just an amazing opportunity to see how well the expanded service is working,” he said on Monday in a post on X.Taking what might have been a life-threatening situation seemingly in stride, Tegtmeyer then argued in favor of Tesla adding more cars to the 10 or so currently on the roads to cut waiting times that had ballooned to 20 minutes.None of this comes as a surprise to Elias Martinez. One of the earliest Full Self-Driving beta testers, he says Tesla’s software has “come a long way” over the past four years. But he argues all available evidence points to the technology being nowhere near robust enough to support the 10,000 cars Musk claimed in May were possible in theory on day one.“These issues prove Tesla should never have launched even with just 10 vehicles,” he tells Fortune. “Yes, it works most of the time, but it blows my mind we’re still seeing issues like FSD running red lights or driving on the wrong side of the road. This shouldn’t be happening on such a regular basis.”The problem is with each car added, the greater the statistical chance of a collision. Any robotaxi service, Waymo included, needs to be virtually flawless in order to scale the service safely—yet with Tesla there’s no sign of that, according to Martinez.A ...