Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in.
Technology
Tesla’s robotaxi is live: here are some of the first reactions
But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised. The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service.
The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in some cases, Tesla is using chase cars and remote drivers as additional backup. (Some vehicles have been spotted without chase vehicles.)
The service is invite only at launch, according to Tesla’s website. A number of pro-Tesla influencers have received invites, which should raise questions about how unbiased these first critical reactions will be. Tesla hasn’t said when the service will be available to the general public.
The limited trial includes 10-20 Model Y vehicles with “Robotaxi” branding on the side. The fully autonomous Cybercab that was first revealed last year won’t be available until 2026 at the earliest. The service operates in a small, relatively safe area of Austin from 6AM to 12AM, avoiding bad weather, highways, airports, and complex intersections.
Despite those hours, the robotaxi service seems to have gotten off to a slow start. Several invitees had yet to receive the robotaxi app by 1PM ET on Sunday. Sawyer Merritt, who posts pro-Tesla content on X, said he saw 30 Waymo vehicles go by while waiting for Tesla’s robotaxi service to start. Musk posted at 1:12PM that the service would be available later that afternoon, adding that initial customers would pay a “flat fee” of $4.20 for rides — a weed joke with which Musk has a troubled history.
While riders waited, the company published a new robotaxi page to its website detailing a lot of the rules and guidelines of the service. Visitors are invited to sign up for updates about when Tesla’s robotaxi service may come to their area. (Musk has said there could be up to a thousand robotaxis on the road “in a few months.”)
After finally being granted access to the app, Merritt posted an image of the service area map, which appeared to cover a small area bordered by the Colorado River to the north, Highway 183 to the east, Highways 290 and 71 to the south, and Zilker Part to the west.
And then the rides began — and they appeared to be mostly uneventful. Several invitees livestreamed themselves summoning their first cars, interacting with the UI, and then arriving at their destination. Several videos lasted hours, as the invitees would conclude a trip and then hail another car immediately after. One tester, Bearded Tesla Guy, described the app’s interface as “basically Uber.” Many had some difficulty finding the pickup location of their waiting Tesla robotaxi.
“This is like Pokemon hunting,” one person on Herbert Ong’s livestream said, “but its robotaxi hunting.”
Once inside, the Tesla-employed safety monitor would ask the riders to show their robotaxi apps to prove their identities. Otherwise the safety monitors kept silent throughout the ride, despite riders trying to get them to talk. I’m assuming that Tesla will need to come up with some other way to identify their riders if they plan on removing the safety monitors from the passenger seat. Waymo, for example, asks customers to unlock their vehicle through the ridehail app.
The rear screen instructs the riders to fasten their seatbelts, and after pressing an animated “start ride” button, the vehicle gets underway. Riders can also start the ride from a similar button in the app. Since riders are registering for the robotaxi app using their preexisting Tesla profiles, they’re greeted with their preferred music apps on the rear screen with all their playlists and saved tracks.
The front display shows a visualization similar to consumer vehicles using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature — even though Musk had said the robotaxis are running on a special version of FSD that’s not available to the average Tesla owner. There are “pull over,” “stop in lane,” or “support” buttons on the center display. Another tester, Chuck Cook, said the visualization lacked some of the controls that a normal Tesla might have.
Pressing the support button places the rider in a queue as they wait for the remote operator to connect. On Cook’s livestream, it took approximately two minutes before an operator finally connected. “We appreciate you calling in,” the operator said (though the cellular connection was poor). “We’re here for any issues to support your ride.”
Throughout the various trips, the robotaxis encountered a bevy of normal situations, like U-turns, speed bumps, pedestrians, construction, and more. The vehicles maintained speeds of about 40 mph or slower. Common words to describe the ride was “smooth,” “great,” and “normal.” One tester said on X that they got the robotaxi to “mess up” in a way that required the remote operator to help out — though they declined to describe it as a disengagement.
Ashok Elluswamy, the head of the company’s self-driving team, posted a photo of several dozen people in a room with 10 large monitors on the wall showing live camera feeds from several vehicles. “Robotaxi launch party,” Elluswamy wrote.
Where Tesla goes from here is the real challenge. Musk has said he also wants to launch a robotaxi service in California, where the regulatory process is a lot more complex than Texas. And even though he has said he wants to take things slow, he also claims that Tesla will have over a thousand driverless vehicles on the road “within a few months.”
Meanwhile, Waymo is operating more than 1,500 driverless vehicles in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin — with plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, DC in the near future. The Alphabet-owned company has said it will grow its fleet to 2,000 vehicles by next year.
Microsoft may once again be struggling to keep up with its own climate goals, according to its 2026 sustainability report. As reported by GeekWire, the report states that Microsoft’s carbon emissions increased 25 percent in 2025, totalling 34 million metric tons “without select interventions.” Microsoft says this was “driven primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure,” as well as the company’s decision last February to stop purchasing “non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates.”
Several years ago, Microsoft set itself a goal to be carbon negative by 2030, meaning it will need to remove more carbon emissions than it produces. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has faced setbacks toward accomplishing that goal, as its 2024 sustainability report showed a similar rise in climate pollution. This year’s report admits that, “While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land, and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand.”
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That old phone sitting in your drawer may have more life left in it than you think. You may look at it and see a dead battery, an outdated camera or a screen that no longer feels worth using. Google and researchers at the University of California San Diego see something else: a tiny computer that may still have useful processing power.
Their idea is called phone cluster computing. Instead of treating retired smartphones as electronic waste, researchers remove the motherboard and redeploy it as part of a low-carbon computing system.
Google says UC San Diego plans to launch a data center built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones in fall 2026. The goal is to provide low-cost cloud computing for students and researchers while reducing the need for newly manufactured server hardware.
That means the next chapter for an old phone may not be a junk drawer. It may be a server rack.
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Researchers plan to launch a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego in fall 2026 to support students and research workloads. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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What is phone cluster computing?
Phone cluster computing takes retired smartphones and turns their core hardware into a computing platform. The process starts by stripping each phone down to the motherboard. That board holds the processor, memory and storage. The display, battery, cameras, chassis and other phone-specific parts are removed.
That step is important because a full phone does not belong in a data center. Batteries can create safety issues. Screens and cameras waste space. The motherboard is the part that still offers computing value.
Once the board is removed, researchers load a general-purpose Linux system onto it. Android already runs on Linux at its core, but Android is built for mobile apps and personal devices. A data center needs something more flexible for cloud workloads. After that, the phone boards can be grouped into clusters. Many small boards then work together like a collection of tiny servers.
Why Google wants old Pixel phones for cloud computing
The AI boom has created a huge appetite for computing power. Data centers need more chips, more electricity and more cooling. At the same time, billions of phones fall out of use around the world.
This Google-backed project takes that conversation in a different direction by asking whether some useful computing can come from hardware we already made.
The project focuses on embodied carbon. That means the emissions created before a device ever turns on. Mining, manufacturing and shipping all add to that carbon footprint.
If a phone motherboard already exists, reusing it can avoid some of the environmental cost tied to manufacturing new hardware. Google says the motherboard accounts for about half of a phone’s embodied carbon, which makes it the most valuable part to recover.
How retired smartphones become low-carbon servers
You cannot plug a pile of old phones into a rack and call it a data center. The process requires careful teardown, new software and a way to manage many boards at once. Google says the project uses containerized applications managed by Kubernetes. That helps coordinate the work across many devices.
The phones are organized into self-managing clusters of about 25 to 50 boards. Each board works as a small Linux machine. Together, they can handle tasks that would otherwise run on traditional cloud servers. That does not make one phone equal to one server. A server has many more processor cores, more memory and data center-grade hardware. A phone board has fewer resources and tighter limits. Still, some jobs do not need a giant machine. They need enough compute to run efficiently without wasting resources.
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Google and UC San Diego are testing a cloud computing system built from retired Pixel phone motherboards, giving old smartphones a possible second life. (Google)
Can old phone processors handle cloud workloads?
The technical case is stronger than you may expect. Google says the single-threaded performance of modern smartphone performance cores can match or beat the per-core performance of some modern multicore servers. In one comparison, a 2023 Pixel Fold was tested against an ASUS RS720A-E11 server using SPEC benchmarks. The Pixel Fold’s performance cores beat the baseline data center server core on many of the tests. That sounds impressive, but there is an important catch.
A smartphone board has a smaller memory limit and fewer cores. It also lacks the management tools and hardware durability that servers are built around. So the project needs the right workloads.
UC San Diego is starting with educational and research computing. That makes sense because many classroom tasks can run on small cloud instances. Google says early experiments showed that a 20-phone cluster could support peak submission rates for a class of more than 75 students. The grading latency also came in below the default AWS backend used in the comparison.
Why UC San Diego is testing a 2,000 Pixel phone data center
UC San Diego plans to use the 2,000-phone cluster to support computer science classes and research workloads. Google says the deployment could support about 100 classes at once. It also describes the system as providing about 50 server-equivalents worth of compute at a fraction of the usual cost.
For a university, that could be a major advantage. Cloud computing costs can rise quickly, especially when many students submit assignments at the same time. If a reused phone cluster can handle some of that load, schools may save money while reducing demand for newly manufactured servers.
This also gives researchers a chance to test phone-based computing at scale. A small lab demo can look promising. A 2,000-board deployment will show much more about reliability, maintenance and day-to-day performance.
Phone cluster computing still has big limits
Phone cluster computing sounds promising, but it still has a lot to prove. Your smartphone was made for daily use in your hand, not nonstop work inside a data center. Data center servers are built to run for years with steady cooling, fast repairs and constant monitoring. Phone motherboards come from devices made for pockets, backpacks and kitchen counters. That alone raises some big questions.
The boards could fail faster than expected. Cooling may also become a challenge once thousands of tiny processors run side by side. Then there is the labor problem, because someone has to safely remove batteries, screens and other parts before the boards can be reused. Cost will be the deciding factor. If teardown, maintenance and replacement work get too expensive, this idea may stay in the research lab.
Phone clusters also will not replace the massive GPU systems that power advanced AI training. They make more sense for smaller cloud jobs, classroom tools and research tasks that fit within smartphone hardware limits. That still leaves plenty of useful work. After all, not every cloud task needs the newest chip.
Why old smartphones could help cut e-waste
The world’s e-waste problem is growing fast. The Global E-waste Monitor projects that electronic waste could climb to 82 million tonnes by 2030, while formal collection and recycling rates are expected to fall to 20%. Old phones are a big part of that problem because many never make it to a proper recycling program. They sit in drawers, land in closets or get tossed out with valuable parts still inside. Even when a phone no longer feels useful to you, its processor, memory and storage may still have work left to do.
CyberGuy has covered related second-life ideas before, including old smartphones being turned into tiny data centers and repurposed EV batteries helping power AI data centers. The common theme is hard to ignore. Some of the hardware already in circulation may still have useful work left to do.
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Google says reusing smartphone motherboards could cut hardware waste and reduce the carbon cost of building new data center servers. (Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)
How to safely recycle or reuse your old phone
This research does not mean you should toss your old phone into a random donation bin tomorrow. Before you recycle, donate, trade in or sell an old phone, you need to protect your data. Back up anything you want to keep. Then sign out of your accounts and securely wipe the device.
CyberGuy has a helpful guide on how to securely get rid of your old cell phone. Privacy comes first whenever you part with a device.
You can also consider trade-in programs, certified refurbishers or reputable electronics recycling programs. If the phone still works, buying refurbished can also keep devices in use longer. CyberGuy has covered what to know before buying refurbished electronics, which is helpful if you want to save money without taking a gamble. The key is to avoid letting old devices sit forgotten forever. A phone in a drawer helps no one.
What this means to you
That old phone in your drawer may not be as useless as it looks. Even if the battery is tired or the camera feels outdated, the processor inside may still have real value.
Now, you probably will not be mailing your old phone to a Google data center anytime soon. Still, this project points to a bigger shift in how we think about retired tech. Instead of sending every old device straight to recycling or letting it collect dust, companies, schools and researchers may find smarter ways to reuse the parts that still work.
There is also a money lesson here. If your current phone still runs well, you may not need to rush into an upgrade just because a newer model comes out. A battery replacement, trade-in or refurbished option could save you money while keeping perfectly good hardware in use longer. To me, that is the real takeaway. The phone you forgot about could possibly still have a job to do.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Google and UC San Diego are testing how to turn retired Pixel phone motherboards into a low-carbon cloud computing platform. The project could give old smartphones a second life while reducing the need for newly manufactured servers. That is important as AI data centers keep demanding more computing power and more electricity. The first major test is expected in fall 2026 with a 2,000-phone data center at UC San Diego. If it works, the cluster could support students and researchers at a lower cost than traditional cloud infrastructure. However, this idea still has to prove it can handle the grind of daily use. Reliability, cooling, teardown labor and maintenance will determine whether phone cluster computing can grow beyond just research. To me, the most relatable part is sitting in your junk drawer. That old phone may seem useless, but its processor could still be powerful enough to help run cloud jobs. Maybe the future of computing starts with hardware we already forgot we owned.
Would you feel good knowing your old phone could help power cloud computing? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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If you’re looking for a relatively affordable way to cut down on cooling costs, Google’s Nest Thermostat can help. It’s packed with smart controls and energy-saving features, and right now it’s on sale in white for $79 ($50 off), which is its best price of the year, at Amazon.
The smart thermostat is quick to install and makes it easy to adjust your home’s temperature whether you’re relaxing in bed or on your way home thanks to the Google Home app. You can also create schedules and control it with your voice using Google Assistant, Alexa, or another Matter-compatible voice assistant.
Once it’s set up, the Nest Thermostat can automatically turn the temperature down when you’re away to help reduce unnecessary energy use, while Google’s Savings Finder feature suggests additional ways to save over time. It also monitors your HVAC system and can alert you if something doesn’t seem right, making it easier to stay on top of maintenance before small issues become bigger, more expensive ones. If you’re eligible, Nest Renew can also automatically shift some of your heating and cooling to times when electricity is cleaner or cheaper.
That said, this is Google’s entry-level model from 2020, so you do miss out on some of the premium features found on the latest Nest Learning Thermostat. Unlike the flagship version, it won’t learn your schedule automatically over time, for example, and lacks support for Nest Temperature Sensors that let you prioritize the temperature in a specific room. Even so, if all you want is an easy way to adjust your home’s temperature remotely and potentially lower your energy bills, the Nest Thermostat is still a solid investment at this price.
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