There may be a day when we are all being ferried around by fully autonomous cars like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. But according to recent reporting from Wired, Tesla’s Robotaxis still heavily rely on remote human drivers. This is giving passengers the mere illusion of autonomy. However, in reality, it’s more of an elaborate drone or puppet.
It’s not just Tesla, but it is mostly Tesla.
Across the autonomous vehicle industry, companies like Waymo, Zoox, and Nuro all admit they rely on “remote assistance” teams, AKA people who step in when a car gets confused, stuck, or encounters something its software can’t compute. But most of these companies seem to be making a genuine attempt to keep these vehicles as autonomous as possible, using humans only to advise the car rather than drive it.
Tesla is having cars straight up driven by remote drivers. Just being RC cars with actual humans inside.
Your Tesla Robotaxi Might Not Be Driving Itself After All
In a now-disclosed letter to US Senator Ed Markey, Tesla confirmed that its remote assistance operators can, in rare cases, take direct control of a robotaxi. These operators are based in Austin and Palo Alto, and can remotely drive vehicles at low speeds, up to about 10 miles per hour, effectively stepping in when the system doesn’t know what else to do. While Tesla frames it as a last resort safety measure, it’s a glaring admission that autonomous cars, or at the very least Tesla’s autonomous cars, can’t handle the obstacles and nuances of real-world driving.
In the world of autonomous vehicles, where the largest breakthrough to mass acceptance hinges on public trust built through a safety record, that distinction matters quite a bit. Other companies go out of their way to ensure that their systems never fully surrender control, mostly due to concerns about latency and limited visibility. Driving a car remotely puts the vehicle and its passengers at the mercy of lag, something any gamer with a slow internet connection can attest is quite maddening.
Markey is concerned with how little the public knows about the theater of Tesla’s Robotaxis. Broadly, none of the companies disclosed how often human intervention is required to keep these things moving, a statistic that would probably reveal just how close, or realistically how very far, we are from truly autonomous vehicles. Experts interviewed by Wired suggest that this omission is intentional because people who saw the actual numbers might have the illusion collapse.
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