Tesla Robotaxi plows through Austin bollards — SkimNews
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- Tesla's Robotaxi with no safety monitor onboard drove straight through flexible plastic bollards sealing off a curb extension at an Austin intersection, then kept driving, according to a Reddit video posted Monday by user bladerskb.
- Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, told investors on the July 22 Q2 2026 earnings call that the program had driven more than 380,000 unsupervised miles across six cities in two states with "zero notable incidents" — a claim made less than a month before the bollard video surfaced.
- The Model Y detected the bollards and stopped for them several times, but couldn't back out of a misread right-turn lane and pushed through with an audible thunk — a decision-making failure, not a perception failure, since Tesla runs without the detailed prior maps Waymo relies on.
- Tesla's cumulative 380,000 unsupervised miles is less than 0.2% of Waymo's 220 million-plus rider-only miles, and the active unsupervised fleet has shrunk from a peak of 25 vehicles to just 14 across all markets since spring.
- Tesla has filed 22 automated driving system incident reports with NHTSA to date, and it's the company's call whether knocking down public street infrastructure counts as a reportable incident.
- Tesla is targeting the end of this month to deploy the Cybercab — a two-seater with no steering wheel and no pedals — on Austin streets running the same software.
Why it matters: Tesla's VP of AI publicly claimed an "impeccable" safety record with "zero notable incidents" less than a month before a video showed a driverless Robotaxi ramming bollards it had already detected and stopped for — exposing the gap between Tesla's mileage marketing and actual decision-making. With the wheel-less Cybercab targeted for Austin streets by month's end, the same software will soon have no steering wheel or pedals as fallback.
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