The company has said that Tesla owners will eventually be able to transform their own cars into self-driving taxis that can collect fares while they’re not being used. But the company released no timeline Sunday for that plan.

Tesla’s driver assistance technology has been the subject of federal safety probes, two recalls, and customer complaints related to reports that the vehicles suddenly brake for no apparent reason and can collide with stationary objects—including emergency vehicles. That tech, which includes the older Autopilot feature and the newer Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature, is distinct from Tesla’s autonomous features. With the assistance features, the drivers are required to stay behind the wheel and keep their eyes on the road at all times. Autonomous features don’t require any driver action or attention.

Issues with those older technologies raise questions about the safety of Tesla’s new autonomous tech, says Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst who focuses on autonomous technology at Telemetry Insight. Full Self-Driving (Supervised) “will work fine for perhaps hours at a time and then randomly make very serious mistakes in ways that are not necessarily repeatable,” he says.

Unlike other autonomous technology developers, which use a number of pricier sensors to detect obstacles around their vehicles, Tesla depends only on cameras. Some experts have cast doubt on that choice, which could potentially lead to issues with sun glare and has been blamed for previous Tesla collisions with emergency vehicles. But financial experts say the approach could give Tesla an advantage in getting its less expensive tech in the hands of consumers more quickly.

Tesla did not respond to questions about robotaxi safety. Musk said earlier this month that the company is “being super paranoid about safety.”

Heavy Traffic

Tesla enters a suddenly busy American autonomous vehicle space. Waymo first launched a driverless service in metro Phoenix, Arizona in 2020, and now operates in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Austin. It is slated to soon open service in Atlanta, Georgia, and Miami, Florida, where customers can order a Waymo using the Uber app.

Amazon-owned Zoox says it will launch its own autonomous service in Las Vegas later this year. May Mobility is aiming to offer rides around Atlanta through the Lyft app this year. VW’s Moia subsidiary announced this spring that it would launch a self-driving service in Los Angeles in 2026, also on the Uber app.

The experiences of those companies show that Tesla has several logistical hurdles to jump before its robotaxi service expands widely. There are the human roles: Remote assistance workers might be on hand to help confused riders remotely; maintenance workers might repair cars during their downtime; cleaners might clear away trash, lost items, or anything worse left behind by riders.

There are infrastructure needs, too. VW’s Moia has operated an electric ride-sharing service in Hamburg, Germany since 2019, using that experience to prep for eventual driverless cars. The firm has determined that it will need a well-developed and decentralized footprint across any city it services. Scattered depots will “host the vehicles and provide charging and maintenance infrastructure, and also the opportunity to do constant safety checks for the vehicle,” says Sascha Meyer, the company’s CEO.

In other words: There’s a big difference between a handful of self-driving cars and a self-driving service.

When the United States bombed Iran in the early hours of Sunday local time, it targeted three facilities central to the country’s nuclear ambitions: the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, the Natanz nuclear facility, and the Isfahan nuclear technology center. Newly released satellite images show the impact of the attack—at least, what can be seen on the ground.

The brunt of the bombing focused on Fordow, where US forces dropped a dozen GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrators as part of its “Midnight Hammer” operation. These 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs are designed to penetrate as deep as 200 feet into the earth before detonating. The Fordow complex is approximately 260 feet underground.

That gap accounts for some of the uncertainty over exactly how much damage the Fordow site sustained. President Donald Trump shared a post on his Truth Social platform following the attack that declared “Fordow is gone,” and later said in a televised address that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” His own military, however, was slightly more circumspect about the outcome in a Sunday morning briefing. “It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there,” said general Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Satellite imagery can inherently only tell you so much about a structure that is situated so far below the surface of the earth. But before and after imagery is the best publicly available information about the bombing’s impact.

A satellite image from before the US bombing of Fordow.

Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters

A satellite image from after the US bombing of Fordow.

Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters

“What we see are six craters, two clusters of three, where there were 12 massive ordnance penetrators dropped,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “The idea is you hit the same spot over and over again to kind of dig down.”

The specific locations of those craters matter as well, says Joseph Rodgers, deputy director and fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues. While the entrance tunnels to the Fordow complex appear not to have been targeted, US bombs fell on what are likely ventilation shafts, based on satellite images of early construction at the site.

“The reason that you’d want to target a ventilation shaft is that it’s a more direct route to the core components of the underground facility,” says Rodgers.

That direct route is especially important given how deep underground Fordow was built. The US military relies on “basically a computer model” of the facility, says Lewis, which tells them “how much pressure it could take before it would severely damage everything inside and maybe even collapse the facility.” By bombarding specific targeted areas with multiple munitions, the US didn’t need bombs capable of penetrating the full 260 feet to cause substantial damage.

“They’re probably not trying to get all the way into the facility. They’re probably just trying to get close enough to it and crush it with a shockwave,” Lewis says. “If you send a big enough shockwave through that facility, it’s going to kill people, break stuff, damage the integrity of it.”