We’re Bracing for an Accident Now That Tesla Is Taking the Safety Drivers Out of Its Robotaxis

Uncategorized
Noel Joshua Hadley

Tesla is preparing for its Robotaxis to go fully driverless and ditch its human safety monitors, according to CEO Elon Musk, while the rest of us prepare for an accident.

Over the weekend, footage circulated on social media showing at least two different Tesla Robotaxis roaming the streets of Austin, Texas, without anyone in the driver’s seat. Musk soon stepped in to confirm what his fans were seeing.

“Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” Musk wrote in a tweet Sunday.

If true, then the automaker is finally gearing up to belatedly deliver on Musk’s grand promise to get rid of the safety monitors, who have always been a conspicuous and embarrassing inclusion, by the end of 2025. Musk has insisted that Tesla included monitors because it was “paranoid” about safety, but the service’s delayed launch this June, plus Tesla’s struggles with its existing self-driving tech, added to the feeling that they were really there to paper over the Robotaxi’s dubious capabilities.

That the safety monitors are now set to be removed will raise serious questions about whether the tech is reliable enough to operate on its own. The human supervisors have already had to make a number of interventions to prevent a potential accident or stop them breaking road laws. They’ve even taken complete control of the vehicles on occasion.

It doesn’t help that Tesla isn’t nearly as transparent about its tech as robot cab leader Waymo. Tesla heavily censors its crash reports sent to regulators under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” making it impossible to determine what occurred during the accidents. Many of the reports come in months after the fact, and the automaker has been investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to report crashes on time.

The data that we are privy to, though, isn’t flattering. As of this week, as spotted by Electrek, the automaker has reported eight crashes since launching the service in late June (and to give an idea of how tardy the updates are, the latest reported crash occurred in October.) Four crashes occurred in a single month. 

Electrek crunched the numbers and estimated that based on Tesla’s November announcement that its fleet had traveled a combined 250,000 miles, the Robotaxis were crashing once every 40,000 miles. For comparison, Waymo’s over 2,500 autonomous taxis, which operate across several major metropolitan areas, like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Austin, have racked up over 100 million fully driverless miles — with no safety monitor or driver — and crash every 98,600 miles on average, per Electrek.

All that being said, Musk has a storied track record of making grand promises he can’t deliver on. Originally, he declared that the Robotaxi service would launch with fully “unsupervised” rides with “no one in the car,” thus making it a huge embarrassment when the cabs eventually rolled out with safety monitors’ in the front passenger seat.

Musk also claimed that over 1,000 Tesla Robotaxis would be patrolling Austin “within a few months” of launching, and estimated that over a million self-driving Teslas would be deployed across the US by the end of 2026 after he releases the Robotaxi software to Tesla owners. Right now, there’s only around 30 Robotaxis in operation.

In other words, we wouldn’t put it past Musk to yoink the safety monitors, but it could very well be the case he’s just throwing a bone to his fans-slash-investors to keep stringing them along. And it worked: Tesla shares soared by up to five percent to an almost year-high after Musk’s announcement, Reuters reported.

“The news Tesla is testing Robotaxis without the safety monitors is in line with our expectations that the company is making progress in its testing, in line with management’s statements during the third quarter earnings call,” Seth Goldstein, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told the newswire. “The market is cheering the progress.”

More on robotaxis: Waymo’s Software Patch to Not Run Down Children Getting Off School Buses Isn’t Working, School Claims

The post We’re Bracing for an Accident Now That Tesla Is Taking the Safety Drivers Out of Its Robotaxis appeared first on Futurism.

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews