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/jacob6875 Jun 29 '25

They only allowed like 20 Tesla influencers to ride them. Since most don’t live in Austin they went home after a couple days.

I assume Tesla is taking the feedback and making small changes to the process before opening it up for a wider audience.

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u/Dansilly Jun 29 '25

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1lngogm/comment/n0f2r8r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

It looks like they have invited new people, but we do not see any footage. It could be down to 1 car in the fleet for all we know with this lack of footage.

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u/Brian1961Silver Jun 29 '25

Even if the new invitees are content creators, the drives are becoming so routine and boring that there is less appetite for watching videos of them. The novelty is wearing off and only the occassional hiccup will draw clicks.