How Long Can Tesla Robotaxis Drive Around Breaking The Law?
Last Updated on: 24th June 2025, 01:40 pm
Tesla’s robotaxi trial in Austin, Texas, was live for less than 24 hours before one of Tesla’s AI-driven cars broke the law. Like, seriously broke the law — I’m not talking about going less than 10 mph over the speed limit. Steve Hanley wrote about it yesterday, referencing a 22-minute drive where one Tesla robotaxi made some egregious errors, but if you want to jump to the problem parts of the drive and see a good commentary on what went wrong, you can watch this short clip (warning: NSFW bad language is used).
Those are clear and serious traffic violations. Luckily, no one was hurt, but it was ridiculous enough that another driver was pushed to the point of honking at the Tesla.
Anyone with any sense of statistics must know that this is a bad, bad sign. Let’s try to show how disappointing this is:
- Tesla only has a very small number of cars doing this trial robotaxi service in Austin (I’ve seen reports of 5 to 35 cars). This is a tiny fleet, so one would not expect to see issues like this happening, statistically, unless the AI is really bad and unprepared for such driving.
- This is on DAY ONE. It didn’t even take a week or two to get this example of absurdly illegal driving. These mistakes should have never happened, but they already happened within 24 hours of launch! Imagine how many times this, or something like it, could happen if the trial keeps going. And, again, remember there aren’t even many cars out there on day one, so the chances of blatant law breaking are really small for something that’s supposed to be almost robotaxi ready.
- Also keep in mind that we don’t have video footage of every ride. We only have video footage of a small percentage of rides. Who knows what other illegal driving occurred on DAY ONE.
- It’s only Tesla employees and investors — superfans — using the service right now. These are people who are not inclined to share anything bad from their drives. What else happened on Day 1, and now Day 2 and Day 3, that has not been shared on social media?
- This is all occurring in a very small geographic area that Tesla FSD is extremely highly trained for and that Tesla decided was the best place to launch its first robotaxi pilot program. It should be a place Tesla FSD is extra prepared to drive and follow the rules.
Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect from the Tesla robotaxi pilot program in Austin. I am not even sure what Tesla has done beyond FSD to try to make these cars and their software robotaxi ready in Austin. From what I had seen, FSD wasn’t ready for robotaxi service, but it should be improving every day and Tesla has future versions constantly in development that it can release at any time. Being geographically limited, too — or “geofenced” — who knows what Tesla has been able to do to make FSD better in that location.
But these are absurd mistakes, and to be showing up so quickly with such a limited fleet of cars, the launch is certainly worse than I expected. There are a few possibilities here:
- The city of Austin, or some other authority, can look at the illegal driving that has occurred and say that these cars are not ready to be driving themselves, and pull the pilot program off the road. (Or Tesla could do the same, but I somehow doubt that would happen.)
- The trial can continue, and there will most likely be accidents that result, which should return us to #1 above.
- Tesla robotaxis could keep breaking the law like this but be permitted to stay in operation and somehow, by some miracle, not lead to any accidents. Tesla could then just let this run and run and run indefinitely. Or the company could even try to expand it if there aren’t accidents, but then I can’t see how this kind of driving won’t lead to accidents eventually.
- Tesla FSD could suddenly, finally get much, much better and the company’s robotaxis could start driving in a better, safer, legal way — more like Waymo’s vehicles do.
We’ll see. What do you think?
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Whether you have solar power or not, please complete our latest solar power survey.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
