Seven state legislators are urging Tesla to wait until September, when a new state law takes effect.
AUSTIN, Texas — State lawmakers are calling on Tesla to pause its Robotaxi plans in Austin, just days before the company’s planned launch on Sunday.
State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt and six other Texas Democrats are urging Tesla to wait until September, when a new state law takes effect.
Under that law, autonomous vehicles will have to be able to comply with traffic laws, and they must have a recording device on board. They also will need to be capable of minimizing risk if the automated driving system breaks.
Additionally, operators must submit a “First Responder Interaction Plan” to the Texas Department of Public Safety, detailing how first responders should interact with the autonomous vehicles, including how to communicate with fleet support, safely remove or tow vehicles, and recognize whether a vehicles is being operated with the automated driving system engaged.
“As members of the Austin delegation in the Texas Senate and Texas House of Representatives, we are formally requesting that Tesla delay autonomous Robotaxi operations until the new law takes effect on September 1, 2025,” the letter, addressed to Tesla Director of Field Quality Eddie Gates, said. “We believe this is in the best interest of both public safety and building public trust in Tesla’s operations.”
Kara Kockelman, a professor of Transportation Engineering at the University of Texas’ Department of Civil Architectural and Environmental Engineering, said existing companies like Waymo and Zoox already have the protocols the law stipulates established, where authorities can send an email with the address of an incident to Waymo management and the company geofences out that location for a half hour.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the first Robotaxi rides will be offered in a Model Y, but lawmakers want more time to review the autonomous vehicle program before it hits Austin streets.
“My sons know that I’m a ‘safety first’ girl, and so we need to make sure that before we’re putting these things on the streets. That has to be the primary goal and priority to keep Texans safe,” State Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D-Austin) said. “I’m all for innovation, but it’s coming fast at us and we need to make sure we’re stopping taking the temperature and making sure that we’re doing what we have to do as lawmakers entrusted to keep Texans safe.”
Lawmakers say if Tesla continues with its June 22 launch, the company should provide detailed information demonstrating it will be compliant with the new law.
“We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” Musk said earlier this month. “First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.”
Kockelman said Tesla should be able to meet all the demands outlined in the letter from lawmakers when the Robotaxi service launches, except for the part about working with the city to establish the required protocols.
On June 10, a Tesla Robotaxi was spotted turning on South Congress Avenue as the company tested the vehicles.
In an interview with CNBC in May, Musk said the Austin Robotaxi service will start with around 10 vehicles before expanding to “thousands” of vehicles, should the launch go smoothly.
“It’s prudent for us to start with a small number, confirm that things are going well and then scale it up,” Musk told CNBC.
Musk said Tesla will bring its robotaxis to Los Angeles and San Francisco after the Austin debut. The cars will be Model Y vehicles running a new version of Tesla’s FSD (Full Self-Driving) Unsupervised software and will only operate within a defined map in Austin. Tesla employees will remotely monitor the fleet.
A group against the Tesla Robotaxi rollout held a protest at Republic Square in Downtown Austin this month. The group, The Dawn Project, in partnership with Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin, said it has serious concerns over the safety and reliability of Tesla’s FSD technology. It cited a recent report that says Tesla is working to prevent the city of Austin from releasing public records on the Robotaxi trial.
Google parent company Alphabet already runs Waymo autonomous vehicles in Austin in partnership with Uber.
Waymo robotaxis have been on Austin roads for more than a year. Unlike Waymos, Tesla doesn’t use LiDAR technology for the self-driving system, relying instead only on camera sensors and machine learning algorithms.
“LiDAR is the backup and redundancy that you want in a heavy rainstorm or fog conditions, so I would hope that the Teslas would pull to the side if it started raining heavily,” Kockelman said.
While she has some concerns about the automated vehicles driving aggressively or responding poorly in certain situations, Kockelman said self-driving technology could still help reduce crashes in the long run.
“I think its crash rate will be half, or lower, versus the average background driver we have here in Austin, because Waymo has been beating the average background crash rate by about 80%,” Kockelman said. “It’s only crashing like 20% of the time that you would expect.”
Austin-based company Avride is in the testing phase and plans to roll out its robotaxis this year. Currently, Volkswagen ADMT and Amazon’s Zoox are in the testing phase in Austin, while Hyundai’s Motional is in the mapping phase.
In 2023, autonomous vehicle company Cruise paused operations in Austin after the California Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the company’s permits to operate driverless vehicles in the state. The following year, General Motors said it would no longer fund the company because of the time and resources needed.
While the new state law will create new safety standards starting in September, local leaders say without those guardrails, the cars shouldn’t hit the streets.
“Sometimes this innovation moves faster than we can keep up with right, and perhaps that’s what happened here,” Hinojosa said. “Now that we know, we’re asking these companies to make to work with us.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating the Tesla robotaxi program. The agency gave Tesla until Thursday to respond to questions about how the cars will be monitored remotely and how the company will intervene if something goes wrong with one of its automated cars.