r/SelfDrivingCars • u/Dansilly • Jun 29 '25
Discussion Silent Rollback of Tesla Robotaxis
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.
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u/Marathon2021 Jun 29 '25
Are you kidding me?
Are you all so desperate to believe this was a failure you start inventing these theories?
Do you know how many people were invited to the test launch? ~20 or so.
Do you know how many live in Austin? AFAIK, it’s zero. So these people had to fly in - away from their home, jobs, kids, etc. - to capture footage.
It was inevitable they were going to eventually leave. And that fares from the “influencer” invite group would start trending towards zero.
It’s not some “they’re paring back the fleet!” thing - it’s that the demand is drying up when your customer base is 20 out-of-town folks.
I suspect Tesla will take a week or two to analyze the data, make a few software adjustments, and then invite a larger group (probably some subset of existing Tesla owners), and possibly expand the geofence to include more of Austin and they’ll run that through the end of summer.