
A few days ago, we reported that Tesla was gearing up for its robotaxi launch, set to kick off in Austin, Texas, and now the details of the service are trickling out.
Electrek says that some popular pro-Tesla influencers on X have gotten invitations to the launch. These invitations came with a list of rules, and the most glaring one was the presence of what Tesla called a "Safety Monitor" in the front passenger seat. This is basically a human supervising driver whose entire job is to watch the car and make sure it does not drive itself into a ditch.
This might feel a little strange, especially given Musk's claims of "no driver" testing in the past. The safety monitor is one of the employees with access to buttons that can stop the car, much like the ones available to Waymo passengers in their fully autonomous rides. The service will operate within a geofenced area from 6 AM to 12 AM and will not run during bad weather.
Other requirements include a credit card on file and an agreement that you will not be a jerk. Participants must also agree to a bunch of other rules, and one of the most interesting ones is that their access can be terminated if they share content on social media that shows the vehicle being misused. On top of that, they're not allowed to reverse engineer the technology in any way.
At least the passenger gets a bit of a break. So, unlike the Tesla Full-Self Driving Beta, which requires the owner's constant attention, the supervising driver is expected to pay attention. At the same time, you, the passenger, can relax and enjoy the ride. According to Electrek's Fred Lambert, the robotaxi launch seems like an optics thing, designed to let Elon Musk say he met his June deadline for launching a robotaxi network.