- At the end of Tesla’s meme-worthy $4.20 Robotaxi ride, it asks riders for a tip.
- If riders try to tip, the app says “Just Kidding.”
- This seems to be a jab at gig-culture’s reliance on tipping for paying rideshare workers fair wages.
If you’re lucky—or if you’ve got enough followers to be a Tesla influencer—and happen to be in Austin, Texas, you may have already taken a ride in one of Tesla’s brand new Robotaxis. The futuristic program features no “real” driver and everything, from summoning the car to wrapping up your ride, feels like the future.
But leave it to Tesla to throw in a meme. Each ride costs exactly $4.20 because of course it does. Nothing says autonomous Robotaxi quite like a weed joke and wink from the billionaire CEO who has a checkered past with that number. That’s why it should be no surprise that it’s not the only Easter egg baked into the Robotaxi. Don’t believe me? Just try tipping it.
Yes, that’s right. You can tip your Robotaxi—well, you can try to.
At the end the trip, the Tesla app displays a screen for the rider to rate the trip quality and leave a comment for Tesla’s engineers to review. It also shows a button asking the rider if they’d like to leave a tip for their Robotaxi—if the rider clicks “Yes,” the app displays a photo of a cyberpunk-esque hedgehog with a simple message: “Just Kidding.”
Tesla won’t actually accept the tip, to be clear. This is an Easter egg in the great Tesla tradition, and a tongue-in-cheek nod to its ability to offer rides at a fraction of the cost of ride-sharing providers.
“Had to be done lol,” joked CEO Elon Musk on his social media platform, X.
See, Musk has long-promised that Tesla’s approach to autonomy would be cheap. Significantly cheaper than owning a traditional car, even. Tesla’s Robotaxi is foregoing complex sensor stacks involving lidar and radar instead relying on cameras, which in theroy makes it cheaper to build than vehicles from competitors like Waymo.
But where Tesla will really shine is by removing the human aspect of current wide-scale ride sharing competitors like Uber and Lyft—both of which offset lower driver pay by promoting the idea that riders should tip their drivers. Only about 28% of riders tip their ride-share drivers, according to Gridwise.
This is a classic Tesla move. It’s part troll, part easter egg, and is definitely a nod to what the future of ride sharing has in store (at least from Tesla). It’s clear that the vision is cheap, driverless rides without the human overhead or gig-worker mentality. Maybe that’s why Uber is already pivoting from being just a provider to an aggregator of other autonomous vehicle services.
So just remember: if you get the chance to take a $4.20 ride in a Tesla robotaxi, the tip screen isn’t real. Don’t get bent out of shape, because it’s just Tesla messing with you while it pokes fun at the business model of other ride sharing companies. No need to tip the robot.
