Well, it's happened again. Another Tesla on Full Self-Driving has gone rogue, this time veering off the road and flipping over in an incident the driver swears they couldn't stop—despite presumably following Tesla's constant reminders to keep hands on wheel and eyes glued to the road.

Here's the thing about autonomous driving: it's ridiculously hard. Not just garden-variety difficult, but the kind of problem that seems straightforward until you start mapping all the edge cases... which turn out to be less "edges" and more "basically most real-world driving scenarios." I've been watching this space develop since 2018, and the pattern never changes—dazzling demos followed by sobering real-world complications that somehow never showed up during those perfectly choreographed test drives.

What we're dealing with here is a classic expectations-versus-reality gap. Tesla has brilliantly cultivated the perception that Full Self-Driving means, you know, actual self-driving, while simultaneously maintaining the legal position that it's merely a fancy driver assistance system requiring constant human babysitting. The cognitive dissonance is literally built into the product name!

This is essentially real-time beta testing of potentially life-altering technology on public roads. When Silicon Valley types championed "move fast and break things," I'm pretty sure they weren't advocating for breaking cars (and potentially people) by flipping vehicles into ditches. But here we are! The standard software development cycle—push updates first, fix bugs later—works perfectly fine when the worst outcome is a crashed web browser. It's considerably more problematic when applied to 4,000-pound metal boxes traveling at 70 mph.

The incentive structure at play fascinates me. Tesla's collected thousands of dollars from customers for FSD capabilities that remain perpetually just around the next corner. They need to demonstrate progress to justify both past payments and encourage new ones, creating this pressure cooker environment to release features before they're truly road-ready.

Meanwhile, drivers who've shelled out serious cash for FSD feel entitled to use it—wouldn't you?—often testing the boundaries of what the system can safely handle.

This latest incident? It'll just pour more gasoline on the regulatory bonfire that's been slowly building around Tesla's autonomous driving claims. The NHTSA has opened multiple investigations already (I've lost count, honestly), and eventually the agency might decide that "beta" software controlling whether your car stays on the road needs slightly more oversight than Tesla's current approach of collecting data and pushing over-the-air updates.

The irony that keeps me up at night is that Tesla has probably done more than any other company to advance autonomous technology and public acceptance. But by consistently overpromising and underdelivering on timelines, they've created this dangerous chasm between what drivers expect and what the system can actually do.

Look, if you're a Tesla owner, treat FSD like what it actually is—an impressive but fundamentally incomplete driver assistance system requiring your constant vigilance—rather than what its name suggests. For potential buyers, maybe reconsider whether paying thousands for "Full Self-Driving" makes sense when the "full" part remains more aspiration than reality.

As for Elon's perpetual promise that robotaxis are just months away? I wouldn't delete your Uber app just yet.

Are Robotaxis Still Launching in June?

June is barreling toward us faster than a Model S in Plaid mode, bringing with it yet another self-imposed deadline in Elon Musk's constantly morphing robotaxi timeline. For those tallying at home (and I know Tesla investors obsessively are), we're approaching roughly the 27th time Musk has promised imminent robotaxi deployment—a prediction that's shown remarkable stretchiness over the years.

Remember way back in 2019? Musk confidently declared there would be "over a million robotaxis on the road" by 2020. Simpler times, weren't they? Then again, perhaps I'm being unfair—turning ordinary cars into autonomous money-printing machines that revolutionize transportation while their owners sleep is apparently... somewhat more complicated than initially calculated.

The financial stakes couldn't be higher. Tesla's astronomical valuation has never been justified by its current car-making business alone—it's priced like a tech company, with autonomous driving capabilities representing a crucial pillar of its future money-making potential. The robotaxi promise has been absolutely central to Tesla's bull case, with Musk himself suggesting each Tesla could generate $30,000 in annual robotaxi revenue. That's not just a car—it's supposedly an investment!

There's this weird psychological phenomenon at work that I've started calling "autonomous driving time dilation," where predictions about self-driving capabilities exist in this quantum state of being simultaneously "right around the corner" and "needing a few more years of development." This isn't just a Tesla thing—practically every company in this space suffers from the same chronological optimism.

What makes Tesla's approach stand out is their willingness to release partial capabilities directly to consumers, creating this massive real-time development laboratory that generates incredible amounts of training data... but also puts beta testing on public roads. This creates both advantages (data collection at an unmatched scale) and disadvantages (regulatory headaches and those pesky safety concerns) compared to competitors like Waymo and Cruise who've taken more controlled—and arguably more responsible—approaches.

The hurdles facing a June robotaxi launch are... substantial, to put it mildly. Beyond the technical challenges of perfecting Full Self-Driving (which, as recent flip-over incidents highlight, remains very much a work in progress), there are regulatory approval processes, insurance complications, and the minor detail of convincing the public to trust their lives to software that still occasionally mistakes shadows for solid objects or gets confused by construction zones.

And yet... dismissing Tesla's autonomous driving ambitions entirely would be shortsighted. Having tracked their progress since the early days, I've watched them demonstrate remarkable technical achievements, building neural networks that process visual data in ways that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. Their vertically integrated approach gives them control over hardware and software development that most competitors can only dream about.

The realistic outcome for June isn't a fully autonomous robotaxi network materializing overnight (sorry, Tesla stans), but rather another incremental step—perhaps a limited pilot program in some carefully geofenced area, or an updated version of FSD with enhanced capabilities but still requiring driver supervision. The full robotaxi vision will likely continue its familiar pattern of being perpetually 6-12 months away.

For Tesla investors (I've spoken with dozens over the years), the key question isn't whether robotaxis will launch exactly as promised in June—they almost certainly won't—but whether the company's approach will eventually yield a transformative autonomous driving system that maintains its lead against increasingly sophisticated competition.

The robotaxi revolution is coming. Just don't count on hailing one this summer.