As we reported last week, the “unsupervised” Robotaxis spotted on January 22 were all being followed by trailing Tesla vehicles with safety monitors inside.
Genius. Musk invented a taxi service that needs 2 cars and 2 drivers per ride.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
277 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
79476 readers
4038 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I can't wait for Musks dominoes to fall. Once Tesla investors realize their investment is worthless all his other companies he has cross leveraged everything with will all list start collapsing and the whole thing comes down.
That would be devastating to the markets, and it hasn't even address the AI bubble which is going to pop and the biggest economic downfall and depression in American history begins.
Tough times ahead no matter what, but the sooner Trump is gone they can start rebuilding.
Next he will sell diagnostic machine that only needs one drop of blood.
This is the same CEO who has promised “full self-driving next year” every year since 2018.
This is just plain lying by electrek...he started promising "self-driving next year" long before that.
You can go on the SpaceX website right now and book a trip to Mars for 2026.
And The Music Man just announced this will be a monthly service to make stonk go up.
“The market will bear the cost”
I don't think it was next year every year before that?
It was just very soon before that.
He may have used "end of year" before 2018...I'm pretty sure he promised "coast-to-coast" FSD capabilities "by end of the year" back in 2016
Oh turns out my timelines are off, I thought the coast to coast promise was 2019.
It was in 2016, for the end of 2017.
"3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" is still one of my favorite quotes from his timeline estimates.
"3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" is still one of my favorite quotes from his timeline estimates.
Not the "two weeks" for months on end?
Anything to distract from the fact that they're a car company selling fewer and fewer cars.
Tesla isn't a car company, it's a techbro company. They don't sell cars, they sell the idea that any day now they'll achieve a technological breakthrough.
But it's becoming obvious that won't happen, so they now pivot to robots. Selling the idea that they'll achieve a breakthrough in that space soon.
Those buying the products aren't the target audience, the investors are. The customers are just useful cattle.
Ah but now they're going to be a robot company selling fewer and fewer robots instead.
People in robot suits you mean
iirc the robots worked but were remotely piloted? I can totally see a brand of rich person who would rather have the 'staff' be physically off site.
And an ai company with no ai product
4D chess....the Optimus robots will drive the cabs.
That would be hilarious and such a malicious way to get the taxi number and robot number for the pay package.
Steve Buscemi's greatest role.
But they can't sell fewer than zero! Egads, Tesla has found a way to never shrink their business anymore!
In a different time the SEC would have been all over this obvious stock market manipulation.
Anyone else feel like Tesla is actually how Elon is being paid for being the one to make twitter fascist and the DOGE bs? Like the majority of shareholders don't actually gaf how the company does and the billion dollar compensation package had nothing to do with Tesla other than it being the vehicle through which the payment was made?
I don’t see how. This is just a continuation of what he was already doing, facilitated by a board of his friends and relatives.
Even worse I have to say I’m not totally against it. All too often ceos get excessive pay regardless of their results. While I haven’t looked in detail not at the history, the claim is these are only for Tesla meeting some extremely ambitious milestones and the payment is stock. Certainly his previous ridiculous allay was in stock and Tesla had some extraordinary growth. If the stock doesn’t go up, then he should never receive that wealth
If it’s truly contingent on the company growth and the board doesn’t throw him a life preserver, that’s not entirely bad. Excessive yes. Extremely excessive. Excessively excessive. But more execs need to have their wealth gated on actual results
I followed a link in that article to this one: Tesla didn’t remove the Robotaxi ‘safety monitor’ – it just moved them to a trailing car:
When Musk says there’s “no safety monitor in the car,” he’s technically telling the truth, the monitor is in a different car, following right behind. But the implication that Tesla has achieved true unsupervised autonomy is misleading at best.
Tesla has achieved remote control driving. It's the only taxi service that has 2 cars per fare.
Waymo and others used a chase car, but they were transparent about that.
They still have some, but the ratio is now many self driving vehicles to one safety car
So instead of just paying a human driver for a taxi they have instead decided to use 2 whole cars AND a human driver. That's peek efficiency there.
Oh, there's efficiency--just in the wrong place. He efficiently made a 4% bump in Tesla stock value by telling a few lies. That's all this is, and has been: profiting on hype/fomo.
On the earnings call yesterday, they claim (I haven't seen proof yet) that the chase car has been removed now.
Remember when the SEC used to call this fraud?
Saying there's no chase car anymore isn't fraud if there's no chase car anymore. I just haven't seen any video proof yet of new rides in the past couple days.
They've said they've removed drivers from inside the taxis, then put them in cars trailing the taxis.
Now they said there's no chase car anymore, and there isn't, because they put the drivers back in the taxi again.
Both statements were technically correct, but purposefully misleading to bump the stock by a few billion right before earnings call.
And at no point during all this did Tesla taxis drive autonomously.
I think we gotta give them more than 24h after he says something is now happening to see if it is happening or not?
It's going to come out soon enough either way.
edit: The call was explicit, no chase cars, no driver in the passenger seat, fully autonomous. And it's not every car, but a small amount, which really could mean just 1.
So far it seems to be zero, or one of the many Youtubers who've been hailing Tesla taxis all day long in order to be the first would have uploaded by now.
You know what, I saw someone transcribe the quote, and I don't think they were claiming there are passengers in the cars with no chase vehicles
"We were able to do our first rides with no safety monitor in the car in Austin — these are paid rides, so these were just randomly paid rides with no safety monitor, and [umm] maybe as of maybe yesterday or so we actually don't even have a chase car or anything like that so these are just cars with no people in them and no one's following the car in Austin."
these are just cars with no people in them and no one's following the car in Austin.
So ya we might not get any videos or proof of this statement which makes it useless.
Ya, I would expect a video any day now to confirm this one way or the other. This isn't a lets wait a month and find out situation.
Remember the Tesla Semi? They had videos transporting either empty boxes or potato chips, literally the least dense cargo possible.
If you have a concern different from the thread, please start another post.
Yes the biggest pilot customer used it to haul lightweight snack items but als yes the claimed fully loaded to the legal limit tests
I really don't care about any of that, what you're doing is called moving the goal post.
You baselessly claimed they committed fraud on the earnings call by saying something, which we truly don't know if they did or didn't yet. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, we'll find out soon enough.
Edit: Sorry it's not moving the goal post, it's a whataboutism. What about that other time.
Double your traffic congestion, or your money back!
. . . or not, since I've never heard of Tesla voluntarily refunding anything.
Fake it till you... Scratch that, just fake it.
make use of AI.
Actually Indians.
Herr Musk is a lying nazi, and anyone holding Tesla is a fool and will get what they deserve
I’m not so sure that everyone holding Tesla is going to get what they deserve anymore.
I agree they should get it, though.
Surprised pikachu dot jay peg