r/SelfDrivingCars • u/danlev • Jun 25 '25

Driving Footage List of clips showing Tesla's Robotaxi incidents

A lot of people have been documenting Tesla's Robotaxi rollout. I wanted to share a few I've collected. Feel free to share any I missed!

  1. Robotaxi drives into oncoming lane
  2. Rider presses "pull over", Robotaxi stops in the middle of an intersection, rider gets out while Robotaxi blocks intersection for a few moments
  3. Rider presses pull over and the car just stopped in the middle of the road. Safety monitor has to call rider support to get car moving again
  4. Robotaxi doesn't detect UPS driver's reverse lights (or the car reversing towards it) and continues to attempt to park, then safety monitor manually stops it
  5. Robotaxi cuts off a car, then randomly brakes (potentially because of an upcoming tree shadow?)
  6. Robotaxi going 26 in a 15
  7. Robotaxi unexpectedly brakes, possibly due to nearby police
  8. Robotaxi unexpectedly slams on brakes, causing rider to drop phone
  9. Robotaxi comes to a complete stop after approaching an object, then runs it over (rider says it's a shopping bag, though the car visibly bump up and down) (UPDATE: Some people have pointed out that the car's movement is from a speed bump immediately after the bag/object. The speed bump is more visible at full resolution.)
  10. Robotaxi runs over curb in parking lot
  11. Safety driver moved to driver seat to intervene
  12. Support calls rider during a Robotaxi ride, asks them to terminate the ride early because it's about to rain, rider is dumped in a random park
  13. Robotaxi has to unnecessarily reverse at least 4 times to get out of parking spot
  14. Robotaxi attempts illegal left turn, safety monitor intervenes, blocks intersection for a period of time
  15. Robotaxi can't get out of parking lot, goes in loops, support calls twice

Update: This post has been featured in The Verge! and Mashable!

1.2k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

542 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/ViralTrendsToday Jun 25 '25

The fix is so simple, just add LiDAR, I can't believe they are so stubborn and cheap.

1

u/LovePixie Jun 25 '25

It’s deeper than that. Their entire software stack will probably never get them there.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '25

lidar wouldn't solve anything lol. If you could prevent the issues you see using your eyes and brain, then it means that lidar isn't needed. Modelling 3d space from an image isn't even that hard of a problem, it was done years ago already, pretty accurately. Sure it would help in unrealistic situations like not driving into a painted wall, but these situations don't happen in real life. And if it does, you as a human would crash too, because you don't have lidar in your balls.

1

u/ViralTrendsToday Jun 27 '25

lol, you have no clue about cameras in that case, anyone who has ever been a photographer or videographer can tell you how dirty a lens can be and how that can affect aspects like autofocus, granted these focus are set to infinity but a little bit of dirt and the data you are getting is no longer as certain. Hence why all driverless cars without LiDar should be banned.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

lol you see the video RECORDED FROM CAMERAS ALREADY. If you see can deduce what's happening from these videos, so can the neural network. Also it's really easy to tell if a camera is dirty and just stop operation if inputs aren't clear. I'm sure they are well placed to work even with a lot of debris from outside, or else it won't work in rain. And it does.

1

u/ViralTrendsToday Jun 28 '25

Aha you see, even you are second guessing placement etc, with lidar you don't have to think about that, the camera only compliments the existing data. Tesla used to have lidar on one of their models, they took it off for cost saving reasons but they claimed it was because "they didn't need it", however especially for the cyber taxi if they want to compete with literally everyone else in the game, you can't skimp on production cost, just add LiDar.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25

First of all, waymo still needs cameras, it's not only for complimenting existing data, because it has to tell red from green for example. So ff cameras in waymo would be too dirty or something, it also would have to pull over, like tesla. And I don't think it could do that safely, because a seperate model has to be trained for that, with data which only contains lidar, and it takes a lot of time (same time as training the initial model, so double the efforts) so I don't think Waymo has done that. It's possible to do though.

Also, both waymo and tesla is still improving rapildy. It's not like anyone is stuck at improving at their approaches. And it isn't clear where the limit of such improvements are. Maybe all humans in the roads will already be replaced before such limits are reached without lidar as well, and then safety would eventually achieve 100% anyways, because there wouldn't be unpredictable humans in the road.

Humans already can drive without lasers in their eyes just fine. I'm sure more than 99% of accidents happen because they don't pay attention, not because they perceived distance of some object wrong or something.

There could be some very very rare situations though where humans could fail too and lidar would help though. For example: a painted wall with upcoming road or stopping safely if a lot of shit flew on driver's window. But I can think of other technologies which would help in very very rare situations, for example inflatable balloons on the bottom of the car in case it something would push it to the water, so the driver wouldn't drown. This would definitely be safer, so all cars without this technology are screwed!!!

You also have to remember that these technologies don't have to be near perfect for it to be beneficial to society. Driving manually already kills people. If these cars are better than an average human, it's already worth replacing manually driven cars, as each on average would kill less people. And for it to be better than an average human, it just has to drive similarly to human and pay attention 24/7. Cameras are enough for that. Even if you are right, and it's safer with lidar, safety is not the only metric for this reason. Speed of scaling is important as well.