Tesla’s Robotaxi Service: Safety Constraints Disguised as Convenience Problems

A Reuters reporter in Dallas ordered a Tesla robotaxi for what should have been a 20-minute, five-mile drive to City Hall. It took nearly two hours. The car avoided the main highway, routed through surface streets, and eventually dropped him in a parking lot a 15-minute walk from his destination. When he called support, they told him the car simply didn’t serve the area around City Hall yet. “I don’t actually know where I am,” he said on video. “I’m trying to figure out my way back to my hotel.”

That experience is not an outlier. It is the pattern.

What Riders Are Actually Experiencing

Reuters reporters tested Tesla’s unsupervised robotaxi service across Austin, Dallas, and Houston over the past month. The results paint a picture of a service still deep in beta testing—more than a year after its initial rollout in Austin.

In Dallas, a reporter watched the car get confused by a “do not enter” sign near a freeway on-ramp. It missed a left turn, kept going straight, then made right turns to double back in a circle. “Eventually I had to call Tesla support just to get their help in making that left turn,” he said. On another ride, the app said it would drop him roughly 15 minutes on foot from two different downtown destinations.