Tesla robotaxi original release date has come and gone

In a parallel universe, Today is Tesla Robotaxi launch day. Unfortunately for the automaker’s qualities, that’s not the world we live in. In April, CEO Elon Musk said the long-awaited Tesla Robotaxi would be officially revealed today, August 8. Well, that doesn’t happen and that announcement from Musk it’s looking more and more like a way to get the automaker’s stock out of the bargain.

Recently, Musk changed the date to October 10, saying he wanted to make some changes to the vehicle before it was unveiled. He reportedly ordered the design changes last month, and his team working on it needed more time to build additional prototypes. from Bloomberg:

The delay was a big disappointment, as the event served as a flashy object to distract from Tesla’s declining sales. The diversionary tactic has been wildly successful — over an 11-week period starting in April, Tesla added $386 billion in market capitalization.

In the past month, Tesla has been able to make much of those gains. The slight delay in the reveal of the robotaxi didn’t help, but the more important issue is the substance of the eventual event. Recent developments suggest that it will be nothing more than a promotional show and that Tesla is putting drivers at risk by allowing customers to test their technology with more relaxed safety controls.

One indicator of how close Tesla is to putting robotaxis on the road is Full Self-Driving, the company’s misleadingly named driver assistance system that doesn’t make its vehicles autonomous.

The system known as FSD is endlessly promoted by Musk and his fans on X, but it doesn’t exactly have a great reputation on Wall Street. Alexander Potter, an upbeat equity analyst at Piper Sandler, hinted at this in a July 28 report titled, “Tesla Could Have Solved the Self-Driving Puzzle. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“We think investors have gotten used to ignoring Tesla’s hyperbole. And we get it,” Potter wrote. “After all, Elon Musk has been over-promising since 2017. There have been over 90 updates to the FSD system in the past four years, and fully autonomous Teslas still don’t exist. Why should the latest FSD update be any different?”

Well, Potter wrote, the latest version of Tesla’s FSD appeared to be “revolutionary” based on user reviews he had seen on the X. In a follow-up report issued three days later, Potter said many of his clients doubted whether social media posts. they were reliable, so he pointed them to a crowded data set called the FSD Community Tracker.

adze the owners filed over 167,000 miles to drive on this tracker, and sure, that sounds like a lot, but one of Musk’s right-hand men posted on social media that over 1.6 billion miles have been driven with the FSD so far. This means miles sent and tracked they are just a small piece of data in the big picture.

In the absence of Tesla publicly reporting detailed data along the lines of what the FSD Community Tracker is trying to collect and present, other Wall Street analysts have taken a different approach to assessing the company’s progress toward self-driving.

William Stein of Truist Securities took the FSD for a test drive in April and July. The analyst, who has a hold rating on Tesla shares, summed up his first run as “good, but not useful today,” then called his second round “no better, probably worse.” In fact, the Model Y he borrowed from a Tesla showroom in suburban New York almost rear-ended another car at a busy intersection.

That wasn’t the only aspect of Stein’s July 29 report that was troubling. He wrote that during his test drive last month, a safety feature appeared to have been removed — he no longer had to pull the steering wheel, not even once, to keep the FSD engaged.

While Tesla warns customers that FSD is intended for use by fully attentive drivers who keep their hands on the wheel, actually applying this has not been the company’s forte. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has deemed its driver monitoring system “weak” when it launched an investigation in May into whether Tesla’s fix for 2 million recalled vehicles late last year did enough to prevent customers from misusing its driver assistance features.

While the Model Y Stein drove didn’t seem to care if he touched the wheel, Tesla also uses an in-car camera to track whether drivers are paying attention. The problem is that Stein said Tesla’s monitoring system was also lenient in this regard. He wrote that he turned his head completely away from the road and the car continued for about 20 to 40 seconds before warning him to be careful.

“I mean, my head was completely turned, I was looking in the back seat,” Stein said last week on Bloomberg Television. “Luckily, I was able to do that because I brought my son with me and I said, ‘Hey, tell me if anything dangerous happens.’

When Stein returned the Model Y to the Tesla showroom, an associate told him he had just experienced “demo mode,” which gives drivers unfamiliar with FSD the opportunity to test the system without as many warnings to pay attention to .

It’s hard to see a world where this so-called Robotaxi is actually released on October 10th, especially since FSD technology from Tesla just is not still there. I’m sure for many of Musk’s fans this won’t matter, but don’t be surprised to see the October 10th deadline come and go, just like August 8th.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.