The world has been watching Tesla’s self-driving taxi rollout in Austin since June 22nd, 2025. In January 2025, Elon Musk promised his investors “unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June … no one in the car.” In the intervening months, he opted to keep human “supervisors” behind the controls of his early self-driving taxis. But they may be as much to protect the cars as to protect the passengers.
The first ever hate crime against a robot?
Self driving cars have a serious PR problem. A “Cruise” self-driving taxi struck a San Francisco pedestrian in October, 2023. She was stuck beneath the car as it dragged her for 20 feet. Experts argued that because she was thrown in front of the car by a nearby accident, it stopped as fast as a human driver would have. But the CEO stepped down and then General Motors shuttered its “Cruise” subsidiary.
In February, 2024, a mob appeared around a self-driving Waymo (Google) taxi in San Francisco. They blocked the vehicle’s path so it could not escape, covered it in graffiti, and broke all its windows. Then someone threw a firework inside and lit it on fire. You can see that incident in the video embedded below:
In June, 2025, protestors in Los Angeles used the Waymo app to call five self-driving taxis. Again, they surrounded the cars, covered them in anti-ICE graffiti, broke the windows, and lit the vehicles on fire. Because emergency services couldn’t get to the cars this time, the battery packs eventually caught fire and they burned for hours. You can see footage of those cars on fire in the second vide, embedded below:
Tesla self-driving taxis us a ” trifecta of babysitting”
Whether or not Tesla’s “supervisors” serve to protect its self-driving taxis, keeping a human supervisor in the Beta version of the cars is a step toward solving self-driving cars’ PR problem. Rider footage shows the Teslas apparently veering into traffic, failing to detect UPS trucks, shutting off during rain storms, and suffering “phantom braking” incidents…