A robotaxi test ride
CNN correspondent Larry Madowo rode a driverless car under strict no‑touch rules during a robotaxi test, calling attention to how hands‑off these trials are becoming. (x.com) Separately, Tesla’s FSD Supervised mode is allowing cars to 'explore' without a set destination, a development that’s restarting conversations about how driver assistance scales. (x.com)
A robotaxi ride now looks less like a driving lesson and more like a passenger trip: riders are told not to touch the wheel, pedals or console while the car does the work. (support.google.com) Waymo’s rider rules say the driver’s seat is off-limits and warn passengers not to touch “any equipment related to the movement of the car,” including the steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedal. The company’s public service now runs 24/7 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix and Los Angeles, with Austin and Atlanta available through Uber and several newer markets being added gradually. (support.google.com 1) (support.google.com 2) Tesla is drawing a different line with Full Self-Driving, which it labels “Supervised.” On its product page, Tesla says the system can handle route navigation, steering, lane changes and parking, but “currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.” (tesla.com) That split — passenger-only robotaxi on one side, driver-supervised assistance on the other — is where the current debate sits. In Austin, Tesla’s first paid robotaxi trial on June 22, 2025 used about 10 Model Y vehicles in a limited zone, with a person in the front seat acting as a “safety monitor,” even when no one sat behind the wheel. (reuters.com) Waymo is already publishing rider-only safety data at city scale. On its safety hub, the company says its driverless fleet had logged 170.7 million rider-only miles through December 2025 across Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix and Austin, with lower injury and airbag-deployment crash rates than human benchmarks in those cities. (waymo.com) Tesla, by contrast, is still under federal scrutiny over the supervised version sold to consumers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation on October 7, 2025 covering about 2.88 million Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) or Full Self-Driving Beta, citing reports that included red-light violations and driving the wrong way. (static.nhtsa.gov) Tesla says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is available in the United States, Canada, China, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and South Korea. The company also says its future “Full Self-Driving (Unsupervised)” system would unlock a fleet of robotaxis, but that product is not what consumer drivers are using today. (tesla.com) The result is a market with two very different user roles. In one car, the human is explicitly a rider told to keep hands off; in the other, the human is explicitly the fallback driver, even when the software appears capable of choosing the route and handling most of the trip. (support.google.com) (tesla.com) That is why a single test ride can land so sharply. The industry is moving toward cars that ask people to behave less like drivers, but the rules, liability and safety oversight still depend on which company’s system is in front of them. (support.google.com) (static.nhtsa.gov)
