Tesla starts testing robotaxis in Austin with no safety drivers as Musk pushes autonomous future

Tesla starts testing robotaxis in Austin with no safety driver | TechCrunch

Just about six months after Tesla started testing its fledgling Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, the company is now letting those cars drive around the city with no safety monitor onboard. The removal of the human safety monitors brings the company a critical step closer to its goal of launching a real commercial Robotaxi service, and it's a step that's been years in the making. CEO Elon Musk spent a nearly decade promising Tesla's cars were just a software update away from being fully driverless. Now he is on the precipice of launching a service meant to compete with Waymo, the Alphabet-owned company that he said last week "never really had a chance against Tesla." The removal of the safety monitors will most likely ramp up the scrutiny on Tesla's ongoing testing in Austin, doubly so when the company starts offering rides in the empty cars. Tesla's small test fleet has been involved in at least seven crashes since June; few details are known about the accidents since the company aggressively redacts its reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Video of a totally empty Tesla Model Y SUV started spreading on social media over the weekend, and on Sunday, Musk confirmed his company was testing "with no occupants." Neither Musk nor Tesla has shared how quickly it plans to move to offer customer rides with no safety monitor. The company's own X account provided a hint in a post Sunday evening: "Slowly, then all at once." Tesla's head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, wrote: "And so it begins!" Tesla started offering rides in Austin to hand-picked influencers and customers in June, with an employee in the passenger seat who could take over if the cars did anything unsafe. Those safety monitors moved to the driver's seat in September. The company has since ditched the wait list, and gradually expanded its service area to cover a large portion of the greater Austin metropolitan area. But its fleet size never grew to more than about 25 to 30 cars by most fans' counts. Musk has claimed Tesla will operate its own fleet of Robotaxis, and said in July he believed this fleet would cover "half of the population of the U.S." by the end of this year. That outrageous target, like so many Musk has set over the years, has been revised down to him claiming in November that Tesla would roughly double its existing Austin fleet, or around 60 vehicles. Tesla has been testing a ride-hail service in the San Francisco area for the last few months, in which drivers use the company's advanced driver assistance software. California has regulations in place that mean Tesla will need to combine multiple permits if it wants to offer fully driverless rides in the state. Texas, on the other hand, does not. Musk has also talked a lot over the years about allowing Tesla owners to add their personal cars to the company's Robotaxi fleet. In 2016, he even promised that every car Tesla made had all the hardware required to eventually become autonomous. That was wrong, and that blog post has since been removed from Tesla's website (the company faces a number of legal challenges over it). Tesla has gone through multiple versions of the hardware that powers its driver assistance software, meaning there are millions of cars on the road that, by Musk's own admission in January, will need to be upgraded.

Tesla stock closes at 2025 high after Musk confirms driverless Robotaxi tests underway in Austin

Nearly six months after launching a limited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas with safety drivers in the car, the company says it's testing driverless vehicles in the city without humans on board. "Testing is underway with no occupants in the car," CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on his social network X over the weekend. Shares of Tesla rose 3.5% to $475.11 at the close of trading on Monday. The stock is now up 18% for the year, and is about 1% off its record reached in December 2024. For more than a decade, Musk has been promising Tesla investors and customers that the company's electric vehicles will soon be upgradable to self-driving cars, capable of serving as unmanned robotaxis, or of completing a cross-country trip without any human intervention. While that still hasn't happened, the company unveiled a Robotaxi-branded ridehail app and service in Austin in June, and a separate car service in the San Francisco Bay Area soon after. On Sunday, Tesla's official account wrote in a pair of posts on X, "The fleet will wake up via over-the-air software update," and "Slowly then all at once." "And so it begins!" wrote Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's vice president of AI software, in a post on X, in response to a video that had been posted by someone else of what appeared to be driverless vehicle in Austin. Tesla hasn't said when it will be able to operate a ride-hailing service without human safety supervisors or drivers on board. But it may have still have a long way to go.

Tesla Is Testing Robotaxis Without Safety Drivers â€" or Riders

Elon Musk confirmed this weekend that Tesla is testing its robotaxis in Austin without safety drivers on board, and his fanboys are losing their minds over it. There’s just one small problem: these tests also don’t have any passengers in the car. The frenzy kicked off Sunday morning when an X user posted a video showing a Tesla robotaxi driving through Austin with no one inside. Musk’s supporters quickly reposted the clip and spread it across the platform, framing it as a major breakthrough. “No one in the car. No safety driver. Fully autonomous. This is actually happening,†wrote one user. Later that afternoon, Musk himself responded to the post, confirming the news: “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car.†Tesla’s head of AI Ashok Elluswamy reposted the video as well, writing, “And so it begins!†Tesla’s official X account helped keep the buzz going, reposting the clip with the caption, “Just Saying.†That same night, the account added a more cryptic message, “Slowly, then all at once.†It’s seems like a lot lot of fuss over a single video of a robotaxi driving itself â€" something Tesla’s competitors have been doing for years. Tesla still has significant ground to make up on its biggest rival in the space, Alphabet-owned Waymo. Waymo operates a fleet of roughly 2,000 robotaxis across multiple cities, including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin itself. The company recently reported it has surpassed 450,000 weekly paid rides, nearly double the 250,000 it logged in April. By comparison, Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin in June as an invite-only program, with a safety monitor seated either in the driver’s or passenger’s seat. According to Robotaxi Tracker, Tesla currently has just 31 active robotaxis operating in the city. That small test fleet has already been involved in at least seven crashes since June. Details of the accidents are scarce, in part because Tesla heavily redacts its reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, citing “confidential†business information. There are also multiple videos online showing Tesla Robotaxis making serious driving mistakes. To be fair, Waymo is no stranger to accidents either. Still, Tesla has a long way to go even by Musk’s own standards. During a call with investors in October, Musk said, “We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year.†With only 17 days left in the year, it’s still an open question whether Musk can meet his own deadline.

Tesla is testing Robotaxis without humans inside, Elon Musk confirms

Musk, Tesla's CEO, quickly confirmed the buzz. "Testing is underway with no occupants in the car," he wrote in response to the viral video. Business Insider reported that this appears to be for testing purposes and not yet available for paying customers. Since launching its robotaxi service in Austin in June, every driverless Tesla has included a human safety monitor in the passenger seat -- ready to intervene as required. This seemingly quiet sighting marks a colossal leap for Musk's long-promised autonomous future. Musk consistently reiterated his promise to remove safety monitors from Tesla's Austin Robotaxis, claiming in September, October, and November of this year. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's AI chief, used his X account on Sunday to signal the start of a new phase, writing, "And so it begins!"

Tesla Is Finally Letting Robotaxis Drive Solo In Austin. Now Comes The Hard Part

Broader rollout for passengers is on the horizon, but the exact date remains unclear. Tesla has begun testing its Model Y robotaxis in Austin without a human safety monitor on board. The robotaxis available for paying passengers still have human supervisors on board. Still, it's a crucial step forward for the automaker that's betting its future on autonomous vehicles, AI and humanoid robots. On Elon Musk's social media platform X, a Tesla fan going by the handle name of Mandablorian first posted the video of a black Model Y cruising along smoothly on Austin's roads without any passengers inside. The clip seems to have gone viral among Tesla's cheerleaders on X, with Musk later confirming that robotaxi testing was underway with no occupants. The robotaxis are guided by Tesla's Full-Self Driving (FSD) software, which is also available on the cars it sells to buyers. But so far, the rollout has been limited to Austin and San Francisco, with human supervisors on board monitoring the vehicles, with plans to expand to more cities next year. Now, as the company plans to gradually remove the human drivers from the equation, it will be a real test of the underlying FSD software, which has so far been far from perfect. The Model Ys autonomously brake, turn, accelerate and navigate complex traffic scenarios with confidence in most cases. But there have been instances of them flouting traffic rules, as evidenced by several passenger-recorded videos online. Since the human-supervised robotaxis rolled in Austin early this year, Tesla also reported seven crash incidents to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Meanwhile, rival Waymo is expanding rapidly. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi service is now clocking 450,000 weekly driverless rides across Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta. That's an 80% increase from 250,000 rides the company disclosed six months ago. It plans to expand to 11 more U.S. cities by the end of 2026. Waymo's safety record is not perfect either. Most recently, three of its Jaguar I-Paces were stuck blocking each other after two of them made contact in San Francisco. In a video conference during his company xAI's hackathon event last week, Musk said that robotaxis without human safety drivers would arrive in Austin in about three weeks. "Unsupervised (Full-Self Driving) is pretty much solved at this point, we're just going through validation right now," he added. I'd take that with a grain of salt -- Musk himself has previously said that he tends to be overoptimistic with timelines. Still, this year was big for robotaxis. Tesla is finally starting to deliver on what it has promised for over a decade, even if its operations are still relatively small. Waymo grew rapidly and many new players joined the race to develop autonomous technology for private vehicles and taxis, all with the ultimate goal of making our roads safer. Next year is poised to be even bigger and could decide whether self-driving vehicles are just a very expensive science project or something that could truly scale and drive profits for these companies, while also delivering safe and affordable rides for passengers.