Tell you what, this one made me shake my head. A rider in Austin hopped into a Tesla Cybercab expecting a ten-minute trip across town, and instead the car's routing system took him on a seventy-minute wandering detour. Seventy minutes. He wound up posting afterward that the Cybercab held him hostage for an hour. I've had trucks leave me walking on a gravel road, but at least I knew who to blame. Torque News has the full rundown, including the part that matters most: NHTSA is already probing the Cybercab program.

Now, I reckon a wrong turn happens. I've taken a few myself, usually because a county road on the map turned out to be a creek bed with ideas. But a wrong turn in my truck is my fault, and I can turn around at the next farmhouse. This fella was sitting in a car with no steering wheel and no pedals, going wherever the software decided. When the routing goes sideways in a machine like that, the rider isn't a driver anymore. He's cargo.

That's what sits wrong with me, and it's the same complaint I had about that RAV4 Prime that cut power on a fella after two hard brakes for a deer. When a computer makes the calls, the person inside just has to live with them. In a deer encounter, that's a second or two of nobody in charge. In a Cybercab, it's an hour of nobody in charge. You can't pull over. You can't take the wheel, mostly because there isn't one.

To be fair to Tesla, this is a new program working the bugs out, and Austin's streets are a real-world test track whether folks signed up for that or not. Anybody who's run new equipment, be it a truck, a tractor, or a software update on a combine, knows the first season shakes things loose. But a combine that acts up costs you a field. A robotaxi that acts up costs a person an hour of his life in a box he can't steer, on streets he shares with everybody else. The margin for figuring it out ought to be a lot thinner.

I'll keep an eye on what NHTSA turns up, same as I'm watching the Toyota thing. And I'll say what I always say: I want a machine I can fix with a socket set, and I want the important decisions to belong to the person holding the wheel. When there's no wheel at all, you'd better be darn sure the routing works before you charge folks by the minute for the scenic route they never asked for.