We checked out Tesla's supervised, invite-only robotaxi launch. Here's what we saw

In this articleTSLA your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTTesla's June launch of its long-awaited "robotaxi" requires a lot of qualifiers: it was supervised, open only to a few invitees and included somewhere between 10-20 vehicles

The s have largely given back that gain since then. "I thought it was extremely smooth

Everything we saw," said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. "Not just from a safety perspective

Maneuverability was way impressive

I thought actually even better than Waymo out of the gates

I thought going into it was going to be an eight out of 10

I think it's a 10 out of 10 relative to our experience. "Other experiences were less smooth: One vehicle drove on the wrong side of the road, one vehicle stopped in the middle of traffic, one braked suddenly on a 40 mph street and another vehicle dropped off a passenger in the middle of an intersection. "What Tesla put out this past Sunday is not a robotaxi," said analyst Gordon Johnson of GLJ Re in note published Thursday. "It is a robotaxi infant that requires constant supervision to stop it from injuring itself or others. "Since 2016, CEO Elon Musk has been mising that Tesla vehicles were on the cusp of full autonomy

Tesla's Master Plan, Part Deux, envisioned a future where every Tesla owner would be able to "add your car to the Tesla d fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. "He said in October of that year that all Tesla vehicles would have the hardware necessary for full self-driving

In 2019, he said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020

So far, none of these predictions have come true

And many reers and rivals have disputed Musk's claim that Teslas already have all the hardware needed for full autonomy

The electric car maker is taking a very different path from every other major company working toward fully self-driving vehicles

It does not use radar or lidar — laser-based devices that map the environment around the vehicle

Companies Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox each use both radar and lidar

Tesla, in contrast, primarily uses cameras

Musk has said he thinks software can make up the difference. "Inside the autonomous vehicle industry, I think the thing that's both frustrating and just puzzling is that, you know, everyone seems to be on the same page," said Ed Niedermeyer, a journalist who has covered Tesla for years and who wrote a book on the company. "You talk to almost any major expert and they'll say, you know, what Tesla is doing is interesting

It's pushing the nology forward in certain ways

It's teaching a dog to drive

If you can teach a dog to drive a little ways, that's super impressive

Does that mean you're going to build a around dogs driving taxis. "The other key difference is Tesla has long been moting what Niedermeyer calls a "general solution" to full self-driving

That means every Tesla will be able to drive itself under all circumstances anywhere in the world

This is pretty much what Musk said in Tesla's second Master Plan, "When true self-driving is apved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. "This presents tremendous nical challenges. "If your operating domain is the whole world, how do you ever get enough miles to know that you've covered everything that you're ever going to see in all the conditions that exist out there in the world. " Niedermeyer said

Everyone else is taking the Waymo route — deploying fleets of vehicles to a small contained area parts of Austin, Texas, Phoenix and San Francisco

The fact that Tesla chose to only deploy robotaxis in a section of Austin, rather than let them roam everywhere, is one reason why Niedermeyer said the company is kind of ving that Waymo is taking the more feasible apach. "It's funny because Tesla wants Austin to be the show, the performance that shows, 'hey, , we're doing this, we can do driverless, right. '" he said. "But really what it's showing is, well, Waymo kind of had it right all along. "Musk still has fans and believers. "Tesla is the future," said Darko tich, an Austin resident who CNBC spoke with at a local coffee shop. tich said he has owned a few Tesla vehicles and has ridden in similar autonomous vehicles from Waymo, which he said he grew to after a bit of apprehension

He has also ridden in robotaxi- cars in China, and has less confidence in those. "They're not as safe," tich said. "They're smaller

But I believe in Teslas, honestly. "Another fan is Michael Simon, from Buda, Texas. "I just think it's amazing what, what Elon is doing," he said. "When I saw robotaxis were active, I was , I want to ride. "Neither tich nor Simon had ridden in the initial launch models, but both said they were looking forward to the chance. "Elon has made a huge investment in the Austin area, and if I were younger and still working, I would absolutely put in a resume for Tesla to try to go to work for them and be part of that exciting nology and the future," Simon said.