After years of promising investors that millions of Tesla robotaxis would soon fill the streets, Elon Musk debuted his driverless car service in a limited public rollout in Austin, Texas. It did not go smoothly.

The 22 June launch initially appeared successful enough, with a flood of videos from pro-Tesla social media influencers praising the service and sharing footage of their rides. Musk celebrated it as a triumph, and the following day, Tesla’s stock rose nearly 10%.

What quickly became apparent, however, was that the same influencer videos Musk promoted also depicted the self-driving cars appearing to break traffic laws or struggle to properly function. By Tuesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had opened an investigation into the service and requested information from Tesla on the incidents.

Let me tell you how thrilled we all are to have a new hazard added to Austin streets.

    • nemith@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      I have a theory on this. They use a lot of ML for FSD and Ap. That a radical redesign would change the model enough that they would have to retrain from scratch. So they keep the facelifts extremely minor .

      Just a theory.

      • vinniep@beehaw.org
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        3 hours ago

        Tesla’s used to have LiDAR - they turned them off in software and stopped adding them to newer models.

      • cabb@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        14 hours ago

        A long time ago Elon promised that full self-driving would be coming to existing cars that had their self-driving package installed which was cameras only. Elon is probably sticking with cameras only to avoid a lawsuit.

      • real_squids@sopuli.xyz
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        24 hours ago

        They stuck the model Y’s new added front camera right under the “grille” shape (where the black trim ends and body colored panels begin), so the rest of it being so bland doesn’t have an excuse. The rest of it’s front cameras are under the front glass, they could at least make an interesting fascia, even if they had to keep the dimensions roughly the same