We Rode in a Tesla Unsupervised Robotaxi and Walked the Cybercab Line

Grayson, there must be something about Austin because one of my favorite past podcast clips is when you said, "We found you," when we were driving by that big Waymo depot. So I love the sound of the "We found it," and we've got a lot more things to find in 2026. And I think we did find some other things in Austin, which we will get to later. But let's start with unsupervised. Took about a dozen rides, which we'll talk about those in a second. But we finally got one. It was like we were right about to end the day before we moved on to our first meeting. So it took a while. The experience felt the same. And I think we're one of the few. Although, I will say this, you know, a lot of people use, including us, the Robo Tracker app, which was a great job. You know, that's a great app to have. But I didn't log any of my rides in the Robo Tracker app, nor did I ride this unsupervised. And I just wonder, you know, while there's a lot of investors, I think broadly, that are using this thing that, you know, maybe not capturing all the data because you're requiring people to actually plug this in. But back to the actual news, which is, you know, look, the unsupervised ride was great. And, you know, as a result, the route on it was a bit circuitous in locations. I thought at one point it was trying to avoid, you know, certain turns, but then the weird turn it made actually made it more difficult for itself to do an unprotected left. What were your impressions of the unsupervised ride?

Our chariot has finally arrived. Let's hop in.

Let's do it.

Well, just the fact that we came here to do some primary research and we obviously seen that unsupervised is operational. Taken plenty of supervised rides today, but, you know, clearly unsupervised is operational in Austin.

Yeah, I mean it feels the same. It feels comfortable speed-wise. It's not any slower, but you're right, routing's a bit different. Oh, look, that Tesla in front of us clearly is robo-taxi. It just squirted its back camera. That's funny. But yeah, I mean I don't know. The Tesla ride is relatively consistent, I guess, no matter whether you're in FSD or in the robo-taxis with or without the safety driver or excuse me, the attendant.

That is true because we've been noticing that it's on standard mode and we've been wishing for the supervised rides that it might be flipping to, you know, Mad Max or Hurry, but this one you don't even see it, but it feels like it's basically doing standard.

Do you see any chase car behind us?

We're doing the work.

Not 100 rides.

And we're one of the few, but hopefully that changes because it's been several months now that we want more people to get in and maybe we'll get some more feedback at South by Southwest which is just starting now. I know our good friend David Moss is out there. I think he may have already gotten an unsupervised ride or I think there was someone else I was following on Twitter. So hopefully we'll get more data points that way. But let's talk about the other dozen rides because the experience there I think for me felt more conservative than the last time we were there including the fact that we had situations where the car basically just stopped and we had a call for support. Now what's interesting to me is the car when it stops and it's in a situation that it doesn't want to handle, can't handle, however you want to describe it, because it's being in my view too cautious, it doesn't automatically go to the remote person. You literally have to hit the button in order for that to happen. And the remote, you know, the person in the safety attendant isn't the one that hits the button. You have to hit the button. And you know when that happens the person basically drives you out of the situation and you go back to where it was. In the case that we had there was actually two. One that was like basically many lanes of traffic and it could have turned into a right turn lane only but I think there was so much traffic it was just too hesitant to go out there. Part of the reason is this thing's on standard mode and not on Mad Max mode. I think that's part of the here. But also maybe there's an issue where they're as they kind of modify the software just like we've seen with FSD when it goes to a, you know, sometimes it gets overly safe like 14.1 and then by 14.2 or 14.3 or maybe that was a 13.1 to 13.2 13.3, it gets safe and then it tweaks back to not so safe. What was some of the feedback that you had from the dozen or so rides that we had where the safety attendant was in that passenger seat?

You used the term very cautious twice. I'm so tired I can't remember. Maybe I said very cautious. I wouldn't say it was very cautious, right? It didn't feel like you were in chill mode. It was just more cautious than what it was the prior time we were there and maybe what we're used to with the FSDs. I think you kind of overemphasize very cautious. But, the bottom line is like the last time we were there, our wait times were shorter. We didn't have any of these situations where there was a quote unquote intervention or where we had a, you know, dial out. And this time we did. And in part, and it wasn't a situation where the car was doing something dangerous and stopped. It just didn't want to take what would have been a more aggressive move in order to continue the ride. In addition to that, there were drop-off issues and I got a sense that this is kind of the thing that's holding them back because, you know, the remote person was like, "Look, if the drop-off or not the person was sitting in the passenger seat, like, don't forget to, you know, tell the app about the drop-off issue." So, I'm guessing that part of, you know, getting to the point where they're going to roll out more of the unsupervised is cleaning up some of the drop-off issues. Maybe, and again, this is just speculation, that also has to do with the circuitous routes. So, that if you go around the long way, you can drop off on the right side of the road as opposed to having to do a U-ey in the middle of a road, right? Because at one point I was dropped off across the road from where my destination is. So, I think, and there's been some chatter about this before, but my guess is that that might be some of the issues that they're dealing with before they can move to the next step.

Now, I have gotten questions about like, you know, what's it like? How much are they running? Are they still running? I mean, again, we got an unsupervised ride, you know. It was one out of basically a dozen rides. Noted that if you're relying on the Robo Tracker app, with again, no, I'm not trying to assault that. It's a great thing that we use, but there's probably a lot of rides that are not getting registered. Certainly our dozen rides weren't getting registered into the app. Just visibly though, we saw, and I thought a lot more Teslas robo taxis on the road. In addition to that, we saw were oftentimes red, but clearly robo taxis with no logo with people in them either driving, well, mostly driving. We found a location. There's a Whataburger on I forget which street that we always seem to see them hanging out. I don't know if they've got a special deal for Tesla employees at the Whataburger, but we saw a lot of them there, but there's just, you know, look, there are a lot of Tesla employees on the road testing this product. So, for people to say like, oh, you know, or for some of the questions that I sometimes get are like, you know, are they even on the road? Absolutely, because we saw a bunch of them.

Yeah, I mean look, and to put it in context, it's definitely not as many of the Waymos that we saw there. Although, frankly, I thought there was less Waymos we saw this time than the last time, which kind of maybe supports the thesis that we had months ago that maybe Waymo was flooding the market right when Tesla was launching to really drive home what they could deliver service. Tons of Waymos, a lot of them empty, a lot of them dirty. We'll get to that later in terms of how Uber allocates rides to the Waymos. But the Teslas there were a lot and I think again, you can put your Inspector Clouseau hat on again because, you know, we also were able to see a large Tesla depot that much larger than what we saw with Avomo. And Avomo, as a reminder, is the company that was servicing the Waymo cars that are there. And like just a massive supply. From cybercabs to cybertrucks to model Ys, just a very big presence. Again, to the point you were just making that, you know, prepping and having the volumes ready, but just waiting for that kind of switch to happen where they're happy enough with where the technology is. And again, I just, you can rewind the podcast if you want. There are clearly many issues that they're still hashing through until they can flip that switch. But when they do, I would suspect that you're going to see a lot of these cars hit the road all at once.

Absolutely. And you know, it just brings up the question, what are they really waiting for? I thought it was the drop-offs. Do you have any other thoughts on this because at the end of the day like with everything I saw and just the feel of it and we're X number of months in since the last time we were in Austin. I'm feeling less confident about getting to several hundred rides by mid-year. With that said, it's still months away and again, I feel like this is going to be a binary event that once they hit it, you know, you're going to see those cars ramp up and clearly they have that type of volume available to them in the market today.

But if they are trying to do that, you know, again, the way the system works is, you know, if one, if for example, if I pulled into, I was going to some type of taco, you know, restaurant and you know, you go into the entrance and the taco entrance, the taco store is at the left and there was like, I don't know, like a CVS, let's call it, on the right. The car basically went over to the right rather than to the taco thing, which I gave the feedback about, you know, it not going to the right location. Not, it's like an extra, let's call it, 15 yd to walk, so not the end of the world. The way the system works is like it's not someone's going to map it and say drop it here. Like it's just, you know, more of the sentient nature of the product that they clearly need to program in order for it to go to the right spot, which should be replicatable, you know, to many more locations. And I guess the question then is like, who knows how long of a time that takes. Like everything that we've heard for many, one at a time. I mean, I think I just, I actually addressed this on the Kodiak call asking Don Burnette about this is that, and not to mention the many other companies that we spoke to on this trip and before that AI is accelerating all these things. Now, I don't know what that, what does that mean? Like is it a week? Is it a month? Is it 3 months? Like what does it mean? But I will say that it's clear that Tesla is, you know, going to wait until they're ready to launch this stuff. And they're not going to push it forward just to hit these milestones that obviously continue to slip in terms of, you know, hitting certain targets for, you know, when they're fully commercial or hitting additional markets or whatever.

I mean, I don't even, this is not even a safety issue. It's just like if it's a drop-off situation, it's, that's like a business decision. Like you want to launch a good business product as well. And again, to get to my earlier point, like the way the system's designed, like if you fix how it parks, like location where it's parked, which by the way is an issue that Waymo has as well to a certain extent. The pace of launching new markets, hitting those seven markets by the end of Q2 to some extent is going to become easier. Every additional market becomes easier. We're still in this kind of teething market in Austin. I think they're beyond most of the safety case aspect of it. Again, if it's anything they have to tweak it the other way based on the disengagement that we experienced. But this other part, you know, we'll see how long it takes.

Yeah, absolutely. And first of all that Giga Texas is the Giga factory there is just massive. The number of people that they're employing there, massive, right? That mean that parking lot was teeming. You know, just a great I think overall experience to see it up front. But on the Y itself, I mean look, you know, most people know this already, but there is a clear goal here. Make a cheaper and more durable car that can drive hundreds of thousands of miles and that can drive the cost down to create a business model. And there was, you know, we saw what the lines were. It looks like they should be on track the April timeline. If you know, let's keep in mind it's going to take the line gets turned on and then it takes the time to ramp it up. That's how manufacturing lines, whether you're making cell phones or cars, like that is how it works. It's probably going to take over a year to ramp it to its full capacity. But then beyond that, we literally saw areas and opportunities where additional machinery was going to be going to add additional lines and to really ramp up that cyber cab volume even further. So, it was great to see kind of mechanics on how that's all coming together.

And the technology that they're using to lighten the car, some of the stuff that we saw is kind of pretty amazing, including the wireless charging aspect where that, you know, you have that port in the back where currently that it'll plug in. But then you'll have the wireless where the car pulls over and charges that way, which is something I'm familiar with, again, which I said in the past podcast from WiTricity. I'm not sure what Tesla is using, probably their own tech, but certainly, you know, interesting. I don't know, there's going to have to be another infrastructure investment, right? Because if you don't have a plug-in, then you can't go to all these Tesla charging stations and plug in at the cyber cabs. So, there will be some infrastructure required there. My impression of like that was the first time I was able to actually get in a cyber cab. I thought overall though, it was, you know, it's a small car. I'm a big guy. I am typically going to prefer the Model Y's that are available to me. Just like I'm not getting Uber X's. I'm not getting into some Honda in terms of the size and my comfort level. But in terms of the economics of the business, getting something cheap, like every single part of that car, which we literally saw as it was unboxed, I guess. And by the way, you know, the cameras with cleaners on them as we've seen with these new model Ys as an example, very well thought out for, you know, a mass ride share market. And that is really what they're targeting.

So, just one other thing I want to throw out there is just, you know, this thing doesn't have a steering wheel. Like even the stuff that they're making, there's probably, you know, a minority of them that have steering wheels. We saw them on the roads of Austin, you know, driving around. The vast majority are not going to have a steering wheel. That's, and maybe this is where you can fill in with listing off the specific codes and regulations, but you can make like, I think it's 2,500 of them. Zoox is going, Zoox, which also, as you probably all know, does not have a steering wheel, or pedals. So, it has the same type of issues that they're going through. We fully expect that those issues will be resolved. And frankly, Zoox can do Tesla a big favor by being on the bleeding edge of getting that, I guess it would be an exception? Why don't you explain to us what the rules are, Grayson?