‘Explain How’: Feds Demand Answers From Tesla Over Austin ‘Robotaxi’ Launch

Federal safety regulators want Tesla to spell out precisely how it will keep riders safe when its camera-only “Robotaxis” hit Austin streets next month.

In a letter publicized Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) demanded Tesla outline exhaustive technical, legal and operational details of the fully self-driving fleet Elon Musk vows to deploy in June. The inquiry folds the Robotaxi rollout into ODI’s ongoing probe of four crashes that occurred when Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software encountered poor visibility — a defect investigation that covers 2.4 million vehicles nationwide.

“Explain how the system is designed to comply with traffic safety laws and how Tesla will monitor for compliance with traffic safety laws including traffic control devices, interactions with construction zones and interactions with first responders,” the letter reads. “Describe how Tesla plans to determine whether its robotaxi system has achieved acceptably safe behavioral competency.”

The agency wants to know how many adapted Model Y vehicles will carry paying passengers, what fallback maneuvers the driverless system will perform if it gets confused, whether remote human supervisors can intervene and why Tesla believes a camera-only sensor suite is sufficient for unsupervised trips. Tesla must also disclose whether the vehicles comply with all federal safety standards or require exemptions — an issue Waymo and Cruise, two rival driverless taxi services, dealt with by adding redundant lidar, radar and high-definition mapping to placate federal authorities.

Musk has long rejected radar and lidar, arguing “people don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes to drive” and that vision and AI-only autonomy are ultimately safer and cheaper.