Like a klutz on an obstacle course, a Tesla Robotaxi with no safety driver seemingly panicked after taking a wrong turn and plowed through a row of bollards, those springy traffic barriers that you are not supposed to run down.

The incident was captured in a video uploaded Monday to the r/SelfDrivingCars subreddit and first spotted by Electrek. It was taken by a rider sitting in the front passenger seat, who sounded progressively more concerned as it dawned on him what the Robotaxi was trying to do.

“It’s going through bollards,” the passenger says, as the car inches towards the barriers.

In the video, it appears the self-driving Tesla drove into a curb extension delineated by plastic bollards, thinking it was a right turn lane. But once it tried to turn onto the next street, it realized it was hemmed in.

“There’s bollards right here. You can’t go this way,” the passenger exhorts the cab. “Don’t do that!”

The vehicle clearly recognizes the obstacles in the way and freezes in place for around a minute, occasionally fidgeting with the steering wheel and pulsing the brakes. Instead of reversing out, though, it eventually decides on a drastic course of action: driving straight through the bollards. 

Luckily for everyone involved, the barriers were the flimsy plastic kind; otherwise, this might’ve ended up being fodder for the World Bollard Association.

The passenger, in any case, was in disbelief.

“It ran through the bollards,” he said. “Holy sh*t.”

It’s a bizarre collision that raises more than a few questions about the Robotaxi software’s decision making process. Mistake number one was turning into a lane that was closed off. Then it couldn’t figure out that it should’ve reversed out of the off-limits area. Most baffling of all, it obviously detected the bollards in its way, but nonetheless chose to run them over.

Like other robotaxi companies, Tesla has teleoperators that can offer assistance or takeover the vehicles when they get  stuck. It’s unclear if these remote helpers were involved in this incident.

Apropos, this weird collision comes about a month after the official Tesla account on X bragged that the Robotaxis had suffered “0 notable incidents across 380,000 miles traveled.” The word “notable” is certainly doing some heavy lifting there, as the vehicles have been spotted barreling the wrong way down a one-way street and driving erratically.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has insisted that the company is “paranoid about safety,” perhaps only to bely the fact that the robotaxi service appears to be regressing, racking up fewer miles from paying customers than it did in the past and operating a fleet with only a dozen or so cars actively giving unsupervised rides. There certainly may be a kernel of truth to Musk’s professed safety concerns, but plowing through bollards that are explitly designed to protect pedestrians from rogue drivers isn’t helping his case.

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