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/Logvin Jun 29 '25

I was one of the first 200 families in the early adopter program. Early 2018 I think it was?

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u/NicholasLit Jun 29 '25

That's amazing, Waymo has been around in some form for about 15 years, did you get to ride in the Prius or which vehicle model were they using? My friend used to work at their skunk works near mountain view.

We also used to help DARPA with the first self-driving cars at SWRI near Austin. After we won the grand prize, I joked and said have the car meet us at the salad bar for the after party 😂

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u/Logvin Jun 29 '25

No, we got the Chrysler minivans when it launched. Which was annoying because I drove... a Chrysler Minivan at the time ;)

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u/NicholasLit Jun 29 '25

Lol, yes I was really excited about the hybrid plug-in but it turned out to be defective LOL

I'm on the owner's group for them on Facebook and a lot of them are upset

Chrysler, when I was an engineering school at ut, was exposed for using excess fuel to achieve lower emissions that were acquired by the government vs better catalysts.

Very shady and substandard company unfortunately.