For two days now, Tesla has been operating its robotaxi service with about a dozen vehicles in Austin, with a safety operator in the passenger seat who has two emergency stop buttons, and social media is already full of videos of – let’s put it mildly – “clumsy driving maneuvers.” The reddit forum on autonomous driving, which has already been very skeptical of the Tesla FSD in the past, has already set up a kind of “death watch” and is collecting the incidents.
Here, for example, it brakes in front of the shadow of a tree (from minute 119:30):
In the next video, a Tesla Robotaxi also brakes unexpectedly for no reason, throwing the unbelted influencer in the back seat forward.
The reason for this appears to be the low sun, which dazzled the cameras.
And here the Tesla Robotaxi chooses the middle of the intersection as the place to drop off the riders.
Waymo’s robotaxis, which not only use cameras like the Teslas, but also have lidars and radars in their sensor range, are also on the road in Austin. Since May 2025, Waymos have completed 250,000 driverless commercial trips per week in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and, as of this week, Atlanta.
With this self-confidence and a clean slate so far in terms of safety and quality of driving comfort for passengers, Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov was probably itching to troll Tesla. He published a video with dangerous driving situations that the Waymos mastered safely. The Waymo Driver is unflustered by adventurous kids on bikes, wandering possums, reckless pedestrians, and distracted drivers in Austin.
This article was also published in German.
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