Tesla’s year is going about as smoothly as you’d expect for a company that seems dead set on making its Nazi salute-throwing leader the richest man in human history, even though his company is tanking according to every conceivable metric. Profits are down, the model lineup is aging poorly, and CEO Elon Musk is basically saying he wants to command a robot army, which is especially terrifying considering that he made his AI, Grok, a Hitler-loving neo-Nazi 4chan dweeb.
It seems like no matter what the company does, it all ends up as bad press and even worse business. Case in point: Tesla’s Robo taxis are already driving around Austin and San Francisco, but their self-driving abilities are suspect at best, so they need in-car human monitors to make sure nothing goes awry.
Ars Technica reports that a San Francisco passenger took to Reddit with a 12-second video that shows his Tesla safety driver in a deep sleep while the car is in motion. According to the rider, the man nodded off not once, not twice, but three times during the trip. When the rider tried informing Tesla, the company didn’t respond, which sounds about right.
Even worse, another Reddit user chimed in claiming they’d had the same safety driver, who also snoozed through traffic from Temescal to San Francisco. Being a human safety driver is definitely a strange job. It’s part babysitter, part lifeguard. Waymo, the current autonomous taxi market leader, requires extensive training before letting employees anywhere near public roads.
Tesla, on the other hand, seems to be flying by the seat of its pants, hoping passengers don’t mind that the person ensuring that everything goes smoothly is snoring, saliva dribbling down his chin. Guess that’s some of the old “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley mantra that sounds cool and edgy until the thing moving fast is a robot car and the thing being broken is you sitting in the back seat.
Since Tesla’s Austin robotaxi trial launched in July, there have been at least seven crashes. Tesla has been providing data to federal safety regulators, but not without redacting a whole lot of it. A comforting move from a company testing self-driving cars in traffic. Even worse, Tesla hasn’t yet obtained the proper permits required to actually run an autonomous ride-hailing service in the state of California.
For now, Tesla hasn’t publicly addressed the sleeping-driver incidents or the permitting questions.
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