Tesla fans eager to use a 100% autonomous robotaxi or robot are in for a disappointment, with the company acknowledging humans will be remotely controlling them.

True autonomous cars and robots are one of the biggest challenges facing the technology sector. Tesla, and CEO Elon Musk, have touted their autonomous solution, even receiving criticism for overselling what the company’s products are actually capable of.

In a recent job posting, Tesla reveals that its autonomous products won’t be truly autonomous, with humans occasionally taking over control.

Tesla AI’s Teleoperation team is charged with providing remote access to our robotaxis and humanoid robots. Our cars and robots operate autonomously in challenging environments. As we iterate on the AI that powers them, we need the ability to access and control them remotely. This requires building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world. At Tesla, we control the entire hardware and software stack, end to end. Our goal is to integrate our hardware, firmware and backend expertise to achieve a cutting-edge system. Our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks. Working with hardware teams, you will drive requirements, make design decisions and implement software integration for this custom teleoperation system.

The company outlines the specific responsibilities associated with the role.

• Responsible for developing the Unreal application[SC1] [DS2] that our Remote Operators use to interface with our cars and robots
• Influence architectural and UX decisions with a focus on usability, security, reliability, and high performance
• Choose technologies that will allow us to scale with our growing fleet of cars and robots while efficiently utilizing cloud infrastructure and managing costs
• Setup and maintain monitoring, metrics & reporting systems for fine-grained observability and actionable alerting

Tesla is one of the leaders in autonomous driving tech, and is quickly establishing itself in the robotics field. If it has to fall back on remote control by humans, it illustrates just how difficult it is to deliver true autonomous operations.