Why Are Tesla Robotaxi Safety Drivers Sitting In The Wrong Seat?

Okay, that headline is sort of a trick question. I think I know why exactly why Tesla is sticking its safety drivers in the passenger’s seat, where a driving instructor might sit: Theater. Pure theater — no other reason. Well, I suppose we can say marketing, which is really just a sort of directed theater, but basically the same thing. The overall goal is to give make it appear that Tesla Robotaxis are happily driving themselves, free from the judgy hands of some moist human, but that’s not entirely true.

I’m not the only one noticing this, of course. There’s other articles making note of this as well, and it’s worth pointing out that there’s no shame in having a safety driver in an automated vehicle, especially in an early test period like this; pretty much every major robotaxi company started this way, like Waymo did until October of 2020. In fact, while driving a beat-to-hell taxi across country just the other day, I saw Zoox automated vehicles driving around Las Vegas, with people monitoring and supervising from the driver’s seat.

When Waymo launches its robotaxi service in New York, which it is currently planning to do, it will launch with safety drivers even though Waymo has demonstrated the ability to go without them – but New York is a new city for Waymo, and it just makes sense to have a human monitoring things for at least the early part of a rollout into a new city, especially one with as unique a traffic situation (pedestrian-focused, dense, complex) as New York. We’ve known Tesla Robotaxis would be supervisors for a while; that’s not been hidden, though the details we now have are interesting.

For whatever reason, Tesla didn’t want to deal with the optics of a human in that driver’s seat. They’re not the only automated vehicle company to do this – the Russian company Yandex did this (now AVRide) back in 2020, but only after having a period of safety drivers in the driver’s seat.

There’s no question that a safety driver’s job is harder if they’re in the passenger’s seat. Have you ever tried to drive from the passenger’s seat? It’s not great. I did it once when I was 17 or so, trying to teach a girlfriend how to drive stick on my old Super Beetle, and she just kind of quit, mid-road, so I had to grab the wheel and shift between my legs – honestly, I was pretty proud of myself for getting the car to a safe place to pull over.

But there’s also no question it’s a less safe way to handle a car than actually being in the seat in front of the controls, so why do it that way? Maybe it’s because the hype around Tesla’s Robotaxi service is so absurdly high, the company felt it had no choice but to make it clear that a human is not driving the car.

I mean, look at the kind of stuff they have to deal with from their fans, which tend to be, um, wildly enthusiastic, to levels like what we see in posts like this one:

what a ridiculous moment this is. this image might be in textbooks at some point.

“tesla launches robotaxi” doesn’t even begin to do any justice in any meaningful way.

kinda just the beginning of post driving civilization. second only to space because it basically rewrites… pic.twitter.com/82WLia85b2

— signüll (@signulll) June 22, 2025

Jeezis, dude, calm down. Check out this quote:

“kinda just the beginning of post driving civilization. second only to space because it basically rewrites daily life on earth, commuting, cities, car ownership, jobs, time, autonomy. the ripple effects are fucking civilizational.”

…I’m not sure there’s enough lubricant in the world to make possible all the eye-rolling this kind of delirious hyperbole demands. I can appreciate the enthusiasm, but join a real cult — you’ll be happier!

So, with unhinged hype like this floating around, you can see why Tesla may have felt pressure to make it clear that safety driver is not actually driving the car. And putting them in the passenger seat instead of the driver’s seat absolutely accomplishes this.

I understand why, for marketing reasons, this move made sense for Tesla. But this also means that for all their crowing about safety, this move pretty clearly shows that safety is not their biggest concern.

Here’s some pictures of a Tesla Robotaxi interior with the safety driver, so you can see the actual setup:

This reaction from @waymo is interesting. We'll wait and see supervisor on passenger seat becomes safety standard of self-driving tech in the U.S or here in S.Korea.
Seoul is currently operating mid-night self-driving taxi which has a steering and pedal. Supervisor for safety… https://t.co/VPOdV8AjxA

— Jaehwan Cho 조재환 (@hohocho) June 23, 2025

Also, in case you weren’t clear, Fred Lambert there was being sarcastic, and the re-poster doesn’t seem to have gotten the joke. Waymo has been operating without safety drivers for about five years; they’re not “shook” and they’re not considering adding supervisors in the passenger seat.

Those pictures also call out how the safety driver seems to be keeping their hands on the door release, which appears to be acting as an emergency stop control. You can also see from the layout how difficult it would be for the safety driver to get over to the driver’s seat if they really needed to take over. They can likely grab the wheel, but there’s no quick way to get to the pedals, if needed.

Others have noticed the safety driver’s hand on the door handle, which, again, may be an emergency stop control. Here’s a video of another Robotaxi ride from a very enthusiastic YouTuber who also notes the safety driver’s hand position, among other things, as he shows the whole process in detail:

That YouTuber, Out Of Spec Reviews, also notes they’re a regular and happy user of FSD itself.

And while Tesla’s FSD (which forms the basis for the software the Robotaxis use) is quite impressive, especially for a camera-only system, it’s hardly flawless, making errors of varying degrees of severity that require human intervention on a pretty regular basis.

In fact, since Tesla launched Robotaxi service in Austin less than a week ago, there have been enough incidents that the National Highway Transit Safety Administration (NHTSA) has taken notice and is looking into the issues. People are even recording lists of incidents already, too.

In fact, here’s one incident, captured on video, where the Robotaxi starts to make a turn in an intersection, then changes its silicon mind for some unclear reason, and drives for a bit into oncoming traffic, crossing the double yellow line:

The safety driver just let the situation play out, perhaps because there was thankfully little traffic on the road, and no immediate and especially dire danger. But this is clearly not safe driving.

There’s another report of an incident where the safety driver had to exit the car and get into the driver’s seat to extract the Robotaxi from the situation – it’s not shown in the video, just noted in this tweet and its responses:

Super tight squeeze for robotaxi in one of my last drives ????

The owner of the parked car asked if it was my car and I told him it was a robotaxi. The robotaxi backed up and then the driver of the parked car left. It looked like the tire touched the parked car. The safety driver… pic.twitter.com/DzNuAQk6Su

— Dirty Tesla (@DirtyTesLa) June 25, 2025

All of this is complicated because the safety drivers are not in a good position to take control of the car when needed, and it’s just for optics. David, my co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Autopian, thinks it makes sense from a marketing perspective, and while he’s not necessarily wrong, that doesn’t mean it’s not a bad idea.

Most people know that the person in the passenger seat is a Tesla employee. They probably even know they’re there to supervise the car’s driving. But by keeping them out of the driver’s seat, the spot where they can most effectively perform their job, Tesla is prioritizing appearances over safety, and deliberately confusing the level of capability their Robotaxis have.

Now, we make all kinds of sacrifices of safety in cars to get other things we want; off-road cars with high ground clearance handle worse, extremely fast cars can introduce all kinds of safety issues, small cars are more vulnerable in wrecks, and, of course, motorcycles exist. But in each of these cases we understand why we have sacrificed some bit of safety, which is because we want something else: to go rock climbing or drive fast or save on gas or whatever.

But in the case of sticking the safety driver in the passenger seat, all that is gained is that Tesla is making their cars appear more capable than they actually are, at potentially some cost of safety. It feels deceptive and shallow to me, and I sincerely hope both that no one is actually fooled, and that there are never any incidents where a safety driver must really get control of that wheel or pedals quickly, because that’s not happening with this current set up.

This feels silly. I hope they just move the damn safety driver into the correct seat.