Tesla Robotaxi fails miserably in Cathie Wood street test | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Cathie Wood has a lot riding on Tesla.

The founder, CEO and chief investment officer of the hedge fund Ark Invest has holdings spread out across the tech sector, with a focus on forward-looking investments that she believes are close to reaching their full potential.

Tesla (TSLA) is by far the biggest bet with a weighted average of 8.63%, well above any of the other 107 combined holdings across Ark’s six ETFs. The next-biggest holding is Roku with a weighted average of 5.36%.

She has stuck with the company through thick and thin.

So far Tesla is down more than 15% year to date in 2025, but Wood has only increased her holdings in the company, steadfast in the belief that Robotaxi will be a trillion-dollar moneymaker for the company within the next decade.

Tesla already has a market cap over $1 trillion, and that’s despite falling sales and cratering brand loyalty. So if Tesla Robotaxi can account for as much as 12.5% of the total addressable market like Wood believes, then investors would be wise to hold on to their Tesla shares, just like Ark has.

But seeing is believing, so Frank Downing and Sam Korus, two of Ark’s research directors, filmed themselves taking a field trip (or a “real world use case,” as Korus puts it) in the Robotaxi in Austin.

Ark Invest takes a wild ride in Tesla Robotaxi

The first thing you notice in the ARK video is the phallic nature of Tesla’s geofenced service area.

This isn’t a coincidence. It is the doing of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who joked about it recently.

“As some may have noted, we have already expanded our service area in Austin. It’s bigger and longer, and it’s going to get even bigger and longer,” the 54-year-old Silicon Valley tech genius told investors during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

The next thing you notice is that it takes 12 minutes for their Robtaxi to arrive. Business Insider recently reported that their Waymo’s autonomous vehicle took about 7 minutes to arrive on average.

But that’s all before they get in the car.

Once they do, the next thing you notice is the safety monitor sitting in the front passenger seat (this becomes important later in the video). He is legally required to be there, but it seems kind of awkward to have a complete stranger in the car who isn’t there to drive.

After being dropped off at their destination five minutes away, the pair switch to another Robotaxi and speak about how there are 40,000 traffic deaths annually and how autonomous driving will save so many lives because “It’s not ‘Can it reach human level?’ It certainly will reach human level. I would argue that if you had FSD running on all cars, it would be safer. Human as a benchmark is the wrong benchmark,” according to Korus.

And that’s when the video gets ironic.

Tesla Robotaxi once again proves it’s not safer than an average human driver

Our Ark hero Frank Downing gets into a third Robotaxi (it’s easy to keep track, since the safety monitor keeps changing), and that’s when the trouble starts.

The autonomous vehicle pulls into the left turning lane on a two-way street before it glitches and starts jerking aggressively, as if it didn’t know what to do next.

The video is edited after that, but from what can be gathered, the safety monitor turns on the hazard lights and calls for live support, as Tesla Robotaxis are designed for remote supervision.

The vehicle is stuck in the left turning lane despite being otherwise fully operational, as the passenger and monitor wait for tech support.

We don’t know how much time elapses while they are stuck in this prone position.

Support tried to allow the autonomous vehicle to finish the ride on its own, but the robot wasn’t having any of that.

Eventually, support instructs the safety monitor to finish the ride, so the human driver gets out of the passenger seat and hops into the driver’s seat.

The video below is timestamped so you can see for yourself.

Tesla Robotaxi is meant to be safer than a human driver

Unfortunately, Korus was no longer along for the ride when Downing’s Robotaxi glitched in the middle of turning left, so he wasn’t able to witness the folly of his hubris.

More automotive:

Humans have a tough time turning left, too. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 36% of all automobile accidents occur at intersections and nearly half a million involve vehicles turning left .

But this isn’t the first video of a Robotaxi struggling with a routine traffic situation, or of FSD driving in the wrong lane.

Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance program has come under heavy scrutiny in recent weeks, as high-profile cases involving Autopilot and FSD make their way through court.

So before Ark boasts about the autonomous future, there seems to be a lot of work to do in the present.