Tesla Robotaxi drives through bollards it already saw
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- Tesla Robotaxi drove through flexible plastic bollards in Austin with no safety monitor onboard, after stopping for them multiple times
- The Model Y entered a closed curb extension, committed to a right-turn lane, couldn't reverse out, and pushed through the posts with an audible thunk
- Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, told investors July 22 that 380,000 unsupervised miles across six cities produced 'zero notable incidents' and an 'impeccable' safety record
- Waymo has logged 220 million rider-only miles and runs roughly 500,000 paid trips weekly — Tesla's 380,000-mile total is less than 0.2% of that
- NHTSA has received 22 automated driving system incident reports from Tesla to date; whether the bollard incident gets added is Tesla's call
- A Tesla remote operator crashed a Robotaxi into a tree stump in Houston in July while trying to extract it from a dead-end street
- Tesla is targeting month's end to deploy the Cybercab — a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals — on Austin streets running the same software
Why it matters: The car saw the obstacle, stopped, then drove through — a decision-making failure, not a perception one. With the Cybercab (no steering wheel, no pedals) targeting Austin streets by month's end, a software choice to push through obstacles becomes a far bigger safety question when there's no hardware fallback for the human.
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