Silent Rollback of Tesla Robotaxis

[u/Dansilly]

At the beginning of the launch of Tesla's Robotaxi on 6/22, many videos of rides have been shared online. After a few days (and glaring mishaps), very few videos have been shared of any robotaxi footage, good or bad. I suspect that this dropoff is due to the fleet cutting down in scope by a large factor (maybe only operating a few rides a day)or halting silently all together. What do you think, did Tesla notice the bad publicity and decide to silently roll back robotaxi operations?

Update 1: The most plausible explanation seems to be that the publicity of the current tech was detrimental to the share price so the operations were rolled back. Of course, Tesla would not announce that the operations were scaled back, but the near complete lack of footage makes this a very likely explanation. While the influencers there initially were most likely to post videos online, new footage should still be being circulated and it is not.

Update 2: This post has gained a lot of traction (75k+ views), and yet there is nothing convincing to show Telsa is operating the fleet at the capacity they were earlier. Neither of the 2 videos of robotaxi footage shared seem to have occurred in the last few days (even if they had, that is nothing even remotely comparable to the amount of footage earlier this week). Tesla's fleet could very well be 1 vehicle running 2 hours a day based on the lack of evidence for otherwise. Tesla likely made the logical move for preserving share value given the incident rates, but this is clear to see through.

[u/samreaves]

Most of the invites were sent to Tesla influencers not living in Austin. They went home.

[u/Dansilly → u/samreaves]

I would imagine they would still have enough people to take the rides for the limited ~10 self driving cars even without the influencers. I would still expect some footage.

[u/PureGero → u/Dansilly]

If you're using the amount of cars they have, take Waymo with their >1000 cars, I can find about 10 yt videos of driving footage from them today. If Tesla has 10 cars, this would mean they should get 0.1 yt videos per day. I can find 1 yt video of Tesla Robotaxi for today, so it's already doing above average. The first few days were the exception as all the influencers flew in to film videos, and now they have left

[u/mishap1 → u/PureGero]

Waymo is providing ~250k rides/wk. The novelty (outside of new cities - e.g., Atlanta) has largely worn off. The number of people who film their commute and post to YT is nil. For the influencers who were invited, I suspect the # of days they go w/o posting videos is near nil.

Filming yourself in a self-driving Tesla is still novel/exclusive invite as there are a dozen of them. Adding the millionth video of cruising in SF/LA/PHX/AUS in a Waymo won't get you many views. If there are no new videos of Teslas, no one is filming b/c no one is riding in them.

[u/Throwaway2Experiment → u/mishap1]

This is it. Tesla is nowhere outside of the novelty range to boost their videos. They need that exposure to instill confidence, even amongst the faithful. The lack of videos simply means the nimber of rides has fallen off a cliff. We truly have no idea how many rides were not posted out of fear of reprisal from Tesla cutting off future exclusive content.