Greetings, salutations, and my thanks—as always—for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.

Me: “Are you here just to monitor for safety?”

Guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the Tesla Model Y I’m riding in: “I can’t specify.”

That was the extent of the conversation during a recent trip I took using Tesla’s Robotaxi service. I was curious why the car that picked me up had a human in it: After all, Tesla bills its service as “the future of autonomy,” and the car did, in fact, drive itself for the entirety of my 4.5-mile journey. But I didn’t get any answers from this guy—or Tesla the corporate entity, which prides itself on ignoring the media and didn’t reply to my emailed questions.

This we do know. After years of anticipation, Tesla rolled out Robotaxis in Austin in June. A month later, th

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