Neither Driver nor Machine: An Autoethnography of Riding Deployed Robotaxis in Shenzhen

Robotaxis are beginning to move beyond restricted pilot programmes and enter everyday traffic in selected cities. Yet much of what we know about interacting with autonomous vehicles (AVs) has been established in simulators and labs, leaving the lived experience of riding a deployed robotaxi underexplored. In this work, we conducted an autoethnographic study of five robotaxi rides across two platforms in Shenzhen. Drawing on our first-hand experience as passengers as well as our expertise in AV research, we surface three tensions: a habitual urge to monitor the road that persists beyond prevailing trust-vigilance accounts; an uncanny unease as the vehicle negotiates traffic too convincingly like a human driver; and the friction of pick-up and drop-off, where the passenger becomes a pedestrian the system no longer attends to. In response to each tension, we offer design considerations that extend current interaction design paradigms to capture the nuances of robotaxis as they operate in real-world settings.