Most recently, the automaker sent invites to a curated group of influencers for a carefully monitored robotaxi trial in a limited zone. Musk also said on X that the rides were being offered for free for a standard price of $4.20.
On Sunday, one of the influencers, Sawyer Merritt, posted himself on X in the afternoon, demonstrating himself ordering, getting picked up, and taking a ride to a nearby bar and restaurant, Frazier’s Long and Low, using a Tesla Robotaxi app.
In the case where Tesla succeeds with the small deployment, it will still be facing major challenges in delivering on Musk’s promises for scaling up faster in Austin and other cities, as reported by industry experts.
This could also take a long time and up to years for Tesla and its self-driving rivals, such as Alphabet’s Waymo, to develop a fully functional robotaxi industry, as highlighted by a Carnegie Mellon University computer engineering professor, Philip Koopman, with expertise in autonomous-vehicle technology.
He also mentioned that a happy-ending story for Tesla would be “the end of the beginning - not the beginning of the end."
More so, most of Tesla’s sky-high stock value now rests on the company’s capability to deliver robotaxis and humanoid robots, as many industry analysts have reported.
Also worth mentioning is that on Friday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed legislation requiring a state permit for operating self-driving vehicles. The law will take effect on September 1st, as reported by Reuters.
In this law, the autonomous vehicle operators need to get approval from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles before they operate on public streets in the absence of a human driver. This allows authorities to revoke permits in cases where they consider those operators to be a public safety concern.
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