Tesla Seems Terrified These Messages About Its Robotaxi Rollout Will Be Released
We're less than a week away from Tesla's launch of a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.
The company's long-awaited ride-hailing service is set to kick off on June 12, albeit with some significant limitations. A mere "ten or 20 vehicles," which will rely on human safety drivers, will ferry passengers on "day one," CEO Elon Musk revealed during the company's disastrous earnings call in April.
Tellingly, the carmaker is already desperately trying to steer the conversation, closely barring the public from accessing information about the robotaxi service pilot. As Reuters reports, Tesla is trying to prevent the city from releasing public records related to the project, raising urgent questions surrounding Tesla's long-awaited foray into the autonomous ride-hailing space.
As Tesla reels from Musk's incredibly damaging leadership — or lack thereof — the stakes are incredibly high. Making matters even worse, the company's shares tanked on Thursday, following the mercurial CEO's ugly spat with the president breaking out into the public, wiping out a record $152 billion in market value. Vehicle sales have also fallen off a cliff, compounding a growing crisis.
In other words, an extraordinary amount is riding on Tesla's Hail Mary robotaxi launch.
To learn more, Reuters requested communications records between Tesla and Austin officials spanning the last two years. But as one public information officer from the city told the agency, "third parties" intervened, preventing them from releasing these cords to protect their "privacy or property interests."
A Tesla lawyer told Reuters that the EV maker was simply protecting "confidential, proprietary, competitively sensitive commercial, and/or trade secret information" and that releasing these records would "irreparably harm Tesla."
That degree of secrecy is certainly suspicious. Apart from protecting its IP, it feels plausible that Tesla is trying to prevent the public from exposing the EV maker's foray into the autonomous ride-hailing industry as half-baked and woefully behind the competition.
Literal insiders certainly seem to feel that way. In a podcast interview last month, Tesla's head of Autopilot and AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, admitted that "technically Waymo is already performing."
"We are lagging by maybe a couple of years," he added.
Musk has bet the company's entire fate on a future in which "hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, Teslas" are "doing self-driving in the US" in a matter of years.
But glaring shortcomings with the firm's driver assistance software remain. Federal regulators are still investigating fatal crashes involving the carmaker's misleadingly-named "Full Self-Driving" feature, casting its future as a fully autonomous taxi company in doubt.
Unperturbed, Musk has remained characteristically optimistic, tweeting late last month that "Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in driver's seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents."
"A month ahead of schedule," he added. "Next month, first self-delivery from factory to customer."
More on the robotaxi launch: Tesla's Robotaxi Launch Is Already an Enormous Mess
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