sf
Tesla Robotaxi in SF: First Ride Notes
A first Tesla robotaxi ride in San Francisco still had a safety driver, but the car handled the trip and even synced Spotify.
I hailed a Tesla robotaxi for the first time. Destination: AAA on 16th Street in Potrero.
The screen in the back seat shows the nav, the ETA, and a row of apps along the bottom — Spotify, Apple Music, a few others. Pull Over button on the left. Support on the right. It’s clean and legible.
There’s a safety driver in the front. She wasn’t doing anything, hands off and not watching the road particularly closely, but she was there. That’s different from Waymo, where the car is fully empty. We ended up chatting; she found the whole thing funny too. Having someone up front changes the feeling of it, makes it feel less like a novelty.
That distinction matters beyond one ride. The broader robotaxi comparison separates a driverless service from a supervised car using the same label.
The car drove well. Smooth lane changes, confident at intersections. No hesitation that stood out. The same Model 3 also does ordinary family road-trip duty when it is not being used as a robotaxi.
Then my Spotify connected automatically to the car’s speakers and started playing a children’s song. Full volume. I don’t know what playlist that came from. The safety driver didn’t react, which is the correct response.
The back-seat interface was better than Waymo’s, but the safety driver made this feel like a preview rather than a finished robotaxi service. The ride also exposed how much children’s music had made it into my Spotify rotation.