Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla’s AI team for the milestone.
For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.
Musk has said that the human monitors are only there because Tesla is being “paranoid about safety,” and not because of some deficiency in the company’s technology. He later predicted that the company would remove the safety monitors by the end of 2025.
It seems like he was off by a couple weeks. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP for autonomy, provided some more context on X, saying the company was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.”
Whether this demonstration represents progress or perhaps a disaster waiting to happen, time will tell. Tesla still uses a waitlist for its robotaxi service, and is rumored to only have a couple dozen vehicles operating in Texas. And even with the safety monitors, Tesla’s robotaxis have crashed approximately eight times in just five months, according to Eletrek. Fans are obviously thrilled by Tesla’s progress, while critics call it a con designed to highlight a capability that doesn’t exist.
To some extent, this mirrors Waymo’s phased rollout strategy of starting with a handful of vehicles with safety monitors and a customer waitlist before gradually removing the monitors and opening up the list to everyone. The difference, of course, is that Waymo has driven over 100 million miles with its fully driverless, unsupervised cars. Tesla says its customers have driven 7.4 billion miles using Full Self-Driving, which is a Level 2 system that requires constant driver supervision. These are not comparable stats.