Driverless Tesla robotaxi stops at barriers, then pushes through anyway
Weeks after Tesla called its robotaxi program's safety record "impeccable," an unsupervised Model Y hesitated at plastic bollards — then rolled straight through them.
What happened: A driverless Tesla Robotaxi in Austin turned into a triangular curb extension sealed off by flexible plastic bollards that have stood there since early 2024. With no one in the driver's seat, the Model Y stopped at the posts, crept forward, backed up, tried again, and sat still for a stretch, all filmed by a passenger in the front seat. Then it pushed through the bollards with an audible crunch and kept driving. Nobody was hurt and the plastic posts are designed to flex, so damage looked minor. The clip, posted by a regular Robotaxi rider on Reddit, surfaced barely a month after Tesla's AI chief told investors the program's safety record was 'impeccable.'
Why it matters: On Tesla's July 22 earnings call, VP of AI Ashok Elluswamy told investors the Robotaxi fleet had logged over 380,000 unsupervised miles across six cities with 'zero notable incidents.' This video doesn't prove that number is false, but it raises the obvious question of what counts as 'notable.' The context makes the claim harder to lean on: Waymo has racked up more than 220 million rider-only miles and runs about 500,000 paid trips a week, meaning Tesla's entire unsupervised total is under 0.2% of Waymo's. Only 14 Tesla vehicles were running driverless in June, down from a peak of 25, and Tesla has already filed 22 automated-driving incident reports with federal regulators.
How it works, plainly: This wasn't a case of the car failing to see the obstacle. It clearly detected the bollards, it stopped for them, repeatedly. Unlike Waymo, Tesla doesn't rely on detailed pre-built maps of every street; its cars work out road layout in real time from cameras. Here the car appears to have committed to what it read as a turn lane, then couldn't figure out how to reverse out of its own mistake. Faced with a detected obstacle it couldn't route around, its fallback was to drive through it. Tesla also offers remote human assistance for tricky spots, though it's unclear if one intervened here; a similar remote-operator mishap hit a tree stump in Houston in July.
The rollout: Tesla removed in-car safety monitors from its Austin Robotaxis back in January, and the fleet is smaller now than it was then rather than bigger. The company is still targeting the end of this month to add the Cybercab, a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, running the same underlying software, to Austin streets, starting with employees before wider riders. That expansion is planned under Texas's statewide autonomous vehicle rules rather than city-specific Robotaxi permits, meaning local officials have less direct say as the same decision-making system takes on more passengers.