Tesla Robotaxi Safety Monitor Forced to Clamber Into Driver’s Seat and Take Over, Passenger Says

Earlier this year, Elon Musk promised that Tesla’s robotaxis would launch offering fully “unsupervised” rides with “no one in the car.”

That turned out to be a lie. And less than a week into the robotaxi service’s debut, which is currently limited to a tiny geofenced area in Austin, Texas, it’s already become apparent that the self-driving cars are very much reliant on the human supervisors — or “safety monitors” — that Musk was adamant he wouldn’t need.

In an incident shared on Wednesday, a popular Tesla content creator who goes by the handle “Dirty Tesla” said that after his robotaxi ride dropped him off, the vehicle struggled to exit the tight parking lot and appeared to back up into a parked car. 

After that car left, according to Dirty Tesla, the safety monitor got out of the front passenger seat, climbed into the driver’s seat to take over, and then drove away.

Footage uploaded to X shows the robotaxi abruptly stopping while trying to squeeze its way out and flashing its hazard lights — a sign that the safety monitor manually intervened. The video doesn’t show the human supervisor taking over the vehicle. But if Dirty Tesla’s account is true, it sounds like labelling them as merely safety “monitors” may be a little misleading, if they’re having to actually drive the cars.

“I wouldn’t even call this unsupervised,” Dirty Tesla wrote in a reply to his video. “It’s clearly supervised.”

Prior to the launch, Tesla kept many details of its robotaxi service under wraps, and avoided even offering a hard launch date. The inclusion of the safety monitors, who sit in the front passenger seat instead of the driver’s, wasn’t revealed until the automaker started sending invites to testers just days ahead of the debut.

The news immediately raised eyebrows. Beyond contradicting Musk’s earlier promise, it’s unusual for a robotaxi service to still require human employees in the vehicles during the commercial phase of operations, TechCrunch noted, which Tesla — charging an eye-rolling $4.20 per ride — immediately jumped into. 

Meanwhile, the automaker has remained suspiciously opaque about the extent that its robotaxis would rely on “teleoperators,” or human employees located offsite but ready to remotely pilot the vehicles. It’s not clear why the safety monitor elected to take over the robotaxi that dropped off Dirty Tesla, instead of allowing a teleoperator to take charge. 

It’s telling that mere days into the robotaxi launch, this isn’t the only instance where a human employee was forced to intervene. A video taken by Tesla influencer and investor Dave Lee showed his robotaxi ride nearly rear-end a UPS truck that it failed to recognize was backing up into the same spot that the Tesla was turning into to drop off its passenger. The crash was avoided when the safety monitor quickly read the situation and tapped the “Stop in Lane” button on the touchscreen, bringing the self-driving car to a halt.

The incidents where the safety monitor didn’t intervene aren’t any less concerning. A growing Reddit list of these incidents — highlighted by the Verge — includes cases where a robotaxi dropped off a passenger in the middle of an intersection, drove over a curb, unexpectedly slammed the brakes so hard that the person recording the video dropped her phone, and came to a complete stop in the middle of the road seemingly because it mistook a tree shadow for an object. (Critics who argue that Tesla made a huge mistake by relying only on cameras to see instead of augmenting its cars with lidar systems will have a field day with that one.)

Some also show the Tesla vehicles violating traffic laws, including clearly driving over the speed limit, and crossing a road’s solid double yellow lines to make it into a left turn lane. This has earned Tesla the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which confirmed on Monday that it had contacted Musk’s company to gather more information, though it hasn’t launched an official investigation.

It’s worth keeping in mind that this already concerning number of incidents is coming from a fleet of just ten to 20 cars, which are operating in an extremely limited part of the city that engineers have manually mapped out. Prior to the rollout, Musk promised that over 1,000 Tesla robotaxis would be deployed in Austin “within a few months” of launching, and that one million of these cars would be on American roads by the end of 2026. What we’ve seen so far suggests that the autonomous cab service is far from being safe enough to scale up to such a ludicrous degree.

More on robotaxis: Tesla Stock in Tailspin After Error-Plagued Robotaxi Debut