Comment Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Tesla launched its robotaxi service on Monday in Austin, with only a few cars involved but a great deal of fanfare. The discrepancy is best explained by one Wikipedia page: “List of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk.” If you are Musk, a person who is addicted to consuming every possible piece of media about yourself and who purports to hate Wikipedia for alleged “far left” bias but probably just hates it for how it portrays you specifically, this page is brutal. So far, the article has graded 21 Musk promises or predictions that he issued with a time horizon. He has failed to meet 19 of them, and they all have this ugly shade of red on the Wikipedia table. It’s just a huge pile of entries that read “No” with a red X. Two of Musk’s predictions have yellow resolutions indicating that Tesla kind of, sort of did what he said. Among the claims for which Musk did not come through is this one from 2019: “Next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis on the road.” No human in the history of the world has blown more smoke up our societal ass about the coming ubiquity of autonomous cars in general and Tesla ones in particular, but on Monday, Musk did indeed put approximately 20 robotaxis on the roads of Austin, Texas—five years late and at least 999,981 cars short. It now appears that Musk has gotten some bang for his buck by repeatedly talking up Tesla’s robotaxi future. He has spent so many years building up expectations and failing to meet them that any tangible progress in the autonomous vehicle game looks like a breakthrough. No individual has associated himself more closely with self-driving cars while doing so little to put them on the road, but now Musk has released (the smallest beta of) a product, and investors who were eager to get excited about a Musk autonomous vehicle project have their chance. Next, we’ll find out how long that can last. Advertisement