Safety concerns emerge as Tesla robotaxis prepare for launch
AUSTIN (Nexstar) — On a quiet street in the Mueller neighborhood of Austin Thursday, Tesla's full self driving mode was put to the test — would it stop for the stop signs on a school bus and avoid hitting children crossing the road?
Though the test was completed with child-sized manikins as opposed to real children, the Tesla failed the test all six times. It blew through school bus stop signs at full speed, running over the manikins and driving off — completing a hit-and-run.
The test was carried out by the Dawn Project, a national organization trying to raise awareness about experimental computer and artificial intelligence technologies. The organization's Project Coordinator Arthur Maltin said that the Tesla's FSD mode is not programmed to stop at school bus stop signs, which is legally required.
Dawn Project Founder Dan O'Dowd said the product does not work well enough to be hitting city streets.
"The product does not work," O'Dowd said. "The self-driving Teslas will not stop for that bus. They do not see it as a bus. They do not know that is a bus. They don't understand what a bus is."
O'Dowd said that the experiment was not purely hypothetical, pointing out a 2023 incident in which a Tesla vehicle struck a minor in North Carolina, leaving him with life threatening injuries.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. We will update this if a statement is received.
The company's CEO, Elon Musk, has said the robotaxis will operate using different software from the Tesla FSD, but it is not clear in which ways the software will differ. Maltin said that if Tesla fixes the bug for the robotaxis, it still would not resolve the issue for the hundreds of thousands of Teslas on the road.
"If their new software that they have in the robotaxis will stop for the school bus, that is obviously a good thing and we applaud that," Maltin said. "But why will they not fix that issue for the 500,000 cars that are driving around America every day?"
On X, Musk said Tesla was planning to start picking up paying customers on June 22, although he did acknowledge that date could change because the company is "being super paranoid about safety."
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent Tesla a letter May 8 requesting more information about the robotaxi rollout in Austin. The NHTSA wanted to know how Tesla was training its autonomous vehicles on the roads and how it would navigate low-visibility conditions. The NHTSA opened an investigation against Tesla after it documented four incidents with Tesla FSD active since October 2024, one of them fatal.
Dr. Missy Cummings, a former senior adviser to the NHTSA, said that the Tesla is not a self-driving car because current versions of the FSD require a driver to be behind the wheel. She cautions any users of the technology when it rolls out in Austin.
"I don't think people really realize how much danger that they're in being in a kind of unprecedented experiment with robotic technology," Cummings said.
These robotaxis will not be an entirely new concept locally — Austin residents are used to seeing fully autonomous vehicles on the roads. Google-owned Waymo has been operating hundreds of vehicles in Austin since last year through the Uber app.
O'Dowd said one downside of Tesla compared with Waymo is that Tesla vehicles are only equipped with cameras, forcing the AI software to infer distance from a picture. Waymo on the other hand is equipped with LiDAR, a technology that allows the car to understand distance from objects and its surroundings.
The LiDAR technology means the car's sensors can be triggered by other motion, like severe weather. During storms in March, multiple Waymo vehicles stopped in the road.
It remains to be seen whether or not Tesla will roll out its robotaxis in June after delays and Musk's stated focus on safety. Maltin said the vehicles should not hit the road until the kinks are worked out.
"Fix these safety defects, or take it off the road until these issues are fixed," Maltin said.