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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is literally operating a robotaxi service.

They're operating a Robotaxi service, not a robotaxi service.

If I create a shuttle bus service for my neighborhood and call it the "Space Shuttle", I am not operating a space shuttle.

The cars drive themselves. Not sure why your definition of robotaxi trumps their very reasonable one.

A whole 15 cars, with "supervisors" in the drivers seat!

And only last week did they even open up the waitlist to non-influencers.

The supervisors are not in the driver's seat.

https://electrek.co/2025/09/03/tesla-moves-robotaxi-safety-m...

The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.

TIL. I stand corrected. Though worth pointing out (as the article does) that on September 1st, new legislation in Texas was passed adding some restrictions to autonomous vehicles. So seems reasonably likely this is more regulatory than necessary.

I wonder what motivated Texas, who was famously very open to such testing, to tighten down the regulations more after time?

I take back my "standing corrected" actually. It appears that the safety person being in the driver seat is only for trips involving highways, which Waymo hasn't launched yet either.

Unsafe at any speed

They've managed to automate it but reduce the labor costs by zero in the process. Now that's innovation.

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