Tesla’s “Robotaxi” service is racking up a wave of terrible rider experiences in Texas — and the complaints are increasingly coming from Tesla’s own fans and ambassadors.
A self-described “Tesla Ambassador” says the service quoted him 66 minutes for a 2.3-mile trip and left him to call an Uber, while a four-time Tesla owner has logged a string of missed pickups and drop-offs left blocks — sometimes miles — from the destination.
A 2.3-mile trip, estimated at 66 minutes #
Reggie Overton, who describes himself in his bio as a “Tesla Ambassador, MBA, AI/ML certified,” posted a detailed account of a Robotaxi ride gone wrong on August 22.
His destination was 2.3 miles from his pickup location, but the Robotaxi estimated the trip would take 1 hour and 6 minutes. When he called support, he was told it was a bug. The estimate briefly dropped to 16 minutes, “but the actual route never changed,” before jumping back up to 57 minutes.
A support representative confirmed he was seeing the same 57-minute estimate but said he couldn’t reroute the vehicle, and suggested Overton “leave a review.” The group ultimately changed their destination, got out of the Robotaxi, and called an Uber to get where they were going.
“For a 2.3-mile trip, this was an incredibly frustrating experience especially when support had no way to correct what was clearly a routing problem,” Overton wrote. He added: “I didn’t even get a refund.”
The post went viral, racking up more than 630,000 views. Only after that did Tesla’s official Robotaxi account respond, telling Overton: “We provided a refund for this ride earlier today and will continue to improve the rider experience at every level.”
A four-time Tesla owner’s running log of failures #
Overton isn’t an outlier. TexasTSLA, a Dallas-based account that bills itself as a “4X Tesla owner” who loves “finding bugs and hacks for Teslas,” has been documenting a steady stream of botched rides — while explicitly noting he’s riding inside the small area Tesla approved.
On August 17, he said a Robotaxi “dropped me off 3 miles away from my car because it was too late at night,” and that rider support “said there was nothing they could do since it’s the end of his shift.” The same night, the app told him his “destination exceeds vehicle’s remaining service time” — at 9:30 p.m.
Two days later, he ran three rides in a single day. The second, he said, “had a scary moment where it panicked and missed our drop off,” and rider support had to “manually drive us to our destination.” The third “kept passing us up” at the destination until the group gave up and walked: “Good thing is we got a lot of steps in.”
By August 21, he filmed one Robotaxi “glitching out and getting stuck and staying in the literal middle of the road” while his own vehicle looped around, missing drop-offs. “Do better @Tesla,” he wrote. “I’m done taking these rides.”
He’s also had to defend himself against Tesla fans accusing him of making it up: “for those who think I just make this stuff up… I’m literally in the tiny geofence that they approved.” His pinned post, from Tesla’s April Dallas launch, shows a Robotaxi missing a highway exit and trying to pull over “as traffic is flying by 80-90mph.”
He is also documenting all these incidents on video.
The pattern Tesla keeps running into #
None of this is new. When Tesla launched Robotaxi in Dallas and Houston with tiny geofences in April, we flagged how limited the service areas were. We’ve also detailed how Robotaxi’s convenience problems — wrong drop-offs, highway avoidance, and remote-attendant interventions — are hiding a real safety bottleneck.
When a rider says support “manually” drove the car to the destination, it’s a reminder that Tesla’s “unsupervised” service still leans on remote humans to finish rides the car can’t complete on its own — a dependence we’ve tracked since our Robotaxi status checks earlier this year.
The competitive context is unforgiving. Waymo is running more than 500,000 paid, driverless rides a week across 10-plus U.S. cities without this constant drumbeat of missed-pickup videos. And Tesla is heading into its Cybercab event scheduled for September 3 in Austin, where it will once again sell the robotaxi vision to investors.
Electrek’s Take #
Tesla ambassadors and four-time owners are the most forgiving audience the company has. These are people who evangelize the brand for free, defend it in replies, and want the technology to work. When they’re the ones filming a Robotaxi stuck in the middle of the road, getting out to walk, and posting “I’m done taking these rides,” you know there’s a real problem.
I’ve seen a dozen of similar problems with Robotaxi over the last week and that’s despite what we know is an extremely low use rate.
Tesla confirmed only 380,000 unsupervised miles from January to July this year. That’s roughyl 15,000 miles per week. It’s not a great look to have so many incendents at this mileage.
Then there’s the refund. Tesla’s own support told Overton there was nothing it could do, and he got nothing — until 630,000 people watched. Only then did the company find a refund “earlier today.” That’s not a support process; that’s PR triage. It works for one viral post at a time, but it doesn’t scale to a real ride-hailing business, and it quietly confirms the ride was a failure Tesla should have refunded on the spot.
The throughline with everything we’ve been reporting is the same: the driving may be improving, but the service around it — routing, pickups, drop-offs, and the remote humans still cleaning up after the car — is nowhere near a product people should be paying for.
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