Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Tesla Just Put Paying Riders in a Car With No Steering Wheel, No Pedals, and No Way to Take Over
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the driver's seat is gone and so is the driver. Reuters reported on September 3rd that Tesla started offering rides in parts of Austin in its Cybercab, a two-seat car with no steering wheel, no pedals, and nobody inside but the passengers.
- 0:17[Guest] Musk's own launch video calls it the first car built specifically for unsupervised self-driving, and unsupervised is the whole story. We covered this in July, when Tesla's Miami robotaxis still had a safety monitor in the passenger seat and Musk promised that seat would be empty later this year.
- 0:34[Host] So he kept the promise. Two months, and the person is out of the car.
- 0:39[Guest] He kept the calendar. What I want to know is what took that person's seat, because the seat is still there and something has to answer for the ride.
- 0:49[Host] Honestly, the missing wheel is what gets me. If the car does something dumb, there is nothing for me to grab.
- 0:56[Guest] You couldn't grab it in Miami either, you rode in the back. What sat up front was a person paid to say stop, and what Tesla had to replace was him, not the wheel.
- 1:07[Host] Fine, then what is up front now?
- 1:10[Guest] Texas records show forty-five Cybercabs registered to Tesla, rides are limited to some areas of Austin, and Tesla has not said what one costs.
- 1:18[Host] Forty-five cars. Musk called it a storm of Cybercabs.
- 1:21[Guest] Forty-five out of about four hundred twenty Tesla robotaxis in the state, most of them ordinary Model Ys with a wheel nobody touches. Waymo runs a far bigger fleet in Texas, and its cars carry radar and laser sensors alongside the cameras. Tesla's carry cameras.
- 1:36[Host] Okay, but somebody has to be watching those forty-five. Who?
- 1:40[Guest] TechCrunch says Tesla has reported a few dozen incidents in Austin since the pilot began, mostly low-speed bumps into parked things, and in a few of them a person at a remote desk took the controls. In one, the Austin American-Statesman found in Tesla's federal crash reports, that person drove a stalled car onto a curb and into a fence. So the human did not vanish. The job moved from the passenger seat to a desk that can steer a stuck car at a jogging pace.
- 2:09[Host] Can the person at the desk stop a car at full speed?
- 2:13[Guest] Nobody has said so, and Thursday was not a day for questions. The Statesman watched reporters get turned away at the door of the invitation-only launch party, there was no livestream, and Musk himself never showed up.
- 2:26[Host] So the day the human leaves the car, the company stops taking questions?
- 2:30[Guest] The answers came in writing instead. The Statesman read the new rider terms: nobody under thirteen rides in a Cybercab, and any dispute goes to arbitration, meaning a private referee instead of a court.
- 2:42[Host] An age limit and a signature. That is what is in the front seat?
- 2:47[Guest] That, and one sentence. Tesla posted that the Cybercab is engineered to be the safest car on the road, and the federal auto safety agency answered that it is in contact with Tesla and evaluating the situation. That is the entire public exchange so far.
- 3:02[Host] Evaluating what, though? I thought you could not even sell a car without a wheel.
- 3:07[Guest] Not banned, capped. Reuters points out federal rules limit how many wheel-less cars a maker can sell, with no limit at all for testing. So Tesla can field as many as it likes by calling them tests, which is exactly what makes it hard to charge a fare.
- 3:24[Host] Which brings me back to money. What would I actually pay to ride one?
- 3:28[Guest] For the Cybercab, nobody knows yet. For a Model Y robotaxi the same afternoon, the Statesman priced a crosstown trip at about twenty dollars, while an electric Uber quoted thirteen. Two years ago at the unveiling, Musk promised thirty or forty cents a mile.
- 3:43[Host] So today it costs more than the guy with the wheel.
- 3:47[Guest] More, and you get less with it. An Uber driver comes bundled with a name, a license, an insurer, and someone a court can call. Tesla spent two months removing that bundle and replaced it with a terms-of-service page.
- 4:01[Host] Come on, Waymo runs thousands of these and nobody is panicking. Maybe people just get used to it.
- 4:07[Guest] Maybe. Pew asked Americans this winter, and seven in ten said they were not comfortable riding in a driverless car. Tesla's bet is that a gold car with no wheel wins those people over faster than a white car with a wheel nobody touches.
- 4:22[Host] So if I am the one climbing in, what does that seat actually hold now?
- 4:27[Guest] Two months ago the open question was how long Tesla would keep a human in the car, and the answer turned out to be about two months. Nothing took his seat. What rides with you now is a remote desk for stalls, a private referee for everything else, and a regulator that says it is evaluating.
- 4:46[Host] That is a lot of paperwork where a person used to be.
- 4:50[Guest] Holding someone responsible did not get cheaper when the person left, it just stopped being included. For more on where accountability goes when the driver does, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.