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Tesla expands ‘Robotaxi’ to entire Austin metro — but still has only ~20 vehicles

Tesla announced today that its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service now covers the entire Austin metro area, a significant expansion of its geofenced operating zone.

It’s a notable milestone on paper, but the actual fleet serving this massive area remains tiny — just ~20 active unsupervised vehicles, according to the latest data, a number that has actually been shrinking.

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Tesla patents camera wiper for self-driving — resulting in more doubts for FSD owners

Tesla has been granted a new patent for a miniature camera cleaning system with a built-in wiper designed to keep vehicle cameras clear for autonomous driving.

The patent addresses one of the most frustrating and well-known issues with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system — dirty cameras that constantly trigger alerts telling drivers to clean them. But Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin already has its own camera washer hardware that consumer vehicles don’t get.

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Waymo starts offering rides in new Ojai robotaxi with 6th-gen Driver

Waymo is beginning to offer select riders trips in its new purpose-built Ojai robotaxi, debuting the company’s 6th-generation Driver hardware across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time.

The Ojai represents a significant step for Waymo, which has now surpassed 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities — a scale that no competitor comes close to matching.

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Tesla’s own AI trainers don’t trust ‘Full Self-Driving’ or its safety stats, Reuters finds

A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.

The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.

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Tesla ‘Robotaxi’ fleet is actually shrinking, not growing, new data shows

Less than a month after we reported that Tesla’s unsupervised “Robotaxi” fleet was finally showing some signs of growth, new data from the Robotaxi Tracker tells a different story. The fleet is actually shrinking.

The number of active unsupervised Tesla “Robotaxis” has dropped to just 20 vehicles — down from the 25 cumulative vehicles we reported in late April — and the total active fleet across all Tesla ride-hailing operations has collapsed to just 34 vehicles.

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