As the race for domination over the driverless ride-hailing services sector in the United States continues, Tesla has further expanded its Robotaxi geofence in Austin, Texas, featuring what seems to be another tongue-in-cheek joke by CEO Elon Musk.
Specifically, the new geofence shape looks a bit like a proverbial, and possibly literal, middle finger to the competition, building on the controversial phallic shape of the first expansion, something that didn’t fail to attract attention this time as well, and users on X, including Farzad, certainly noticed.
Another user who observed the likeness between the expanded geofence on the map and the crude gesture was Daniel Harding, a Tesla investor and space enthusiast, who pointed out that all he saw was “Tesla giving the middle finger,” in his X post on August 3.
According to the post by user Teslaconomics, “The balls of the Tesla Robotaxi geofence in Austin, Texas just got larger,” describing none-too-subtly the new and edgy geofence shape of Tesla’s Robotaxi service in Austin and the attitude of being able to expand in any direction it wants.
Tesla Robotaxi shifts into high gear
Meanwhile, Tesla Robotaxi easily overtook Waymo, its biggest competitor, in an exceptionally important performance metric – the size of the service area – in a matter of days after first hitting the streets in Austin, all the while appearing to make a joke about it with the peculiar shape on the map.
As it happens, the service area is the most important metric in telling how much progress a driverless ride-hailing service has made. Due to this, companies operating such a network are making it a point to compete for ever-larger pieces of territory they are in.
More recently, Tesla Robotaxi upgraded its service to make it noticeably better and more convenient for customers, stopping in the exact location of the user’s phone instead of navigating strictly to the pickup point listed in the app, which CEO Elon Musk confirmed himself.
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