Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday that his company is now running a small number of its Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, without a human driver or safety supervisor on board.
“Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car,” Musk posted on X. “Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team!”
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of software, wrote in a separate post that the Austin Robotaxi service included, “a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors.” He said the ratio of driverless to supervised vehicles will increase over time in that market.
Tesla shares rose 4.2% on Thursday to close at $449.36.
Tesla lags behind several companies that are already operating commercial robotaxi services with no drivers or safety monitors present. Alphabet’s Waymo leads the U.S. market, while Baidu’s Apollo Go is out front in China with significant competition from WeRide.
Other players are joining the fray, as Amazon’s Zoox is now operating limited driverless services in the U.S., and startups like May Mobility and Nuro are developing their driverless offerings.
Musk said in July that Tesla would likely have “autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year.” The company fell far shy of that goal.
However, Tesla drummed up excitement with the launch of its Robotaxi ride-hailing app, and its initial services in Austin and the San Francisco Bay area.
In Texas, Tesla obtained a permit to run a transportation networking company, which allowed it to use “automated driving systems,” or driverless vehicles, there. But in California, Tesla has yet to obtain permits that would allow it to conduct driverless testing or robotaxi rides without a human at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Musk said, “I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point,” adding that he expects his company’s Robotaxi service will be “very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.”
Musk is notorious for missing his self-imposed timelines for grand technical or business achievements.
I appreciate the context this article contains. You should never believe a word Elmo says as a general rule. And here, it turns out, this accomplishment comes with a big asterisk.
Earlier today, Elon Musk announced on X that Tesla had “just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.” Tesla’s stock immediately jumped over 4% on the news. Headlines across the financial press celebrated the milestone.
There’s just one problem: it appears to be another game of smoke and mirrors. The Robotaxi cars spotted without “safety monitor” were all being followed by a trailing black Tesla supervising the “driverless” Robotaxi.
It means Tesla didn’t “remove the safety monitor”, it just moved them to a vehicle behind them.
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Let’s be very clear about what’s happening here.
When Musk says there’s “no safety monitor in the car,” he’s technically telling the truth, the monitor is in a different car, following right behind. But the implication that Tesla has achieved true unsupervised autonomy is misleading at best.
True unsupervised autonomy means the vehicle can operate safely without any human backup ready to intervene. That’s what Waymo does, their vehicles operate genuinely alone, without chase cars, across multiple cities. They’ve accumulated over 100 million fully driverless miles.
Now, there’s still some remote teleoperation when the vehicle gets into trouble, but it’s clear that Tesla is not even there yet.
Tesla’s approach is fundamentally different. Having a chase car follow your “autonomous” vehicle everywhere defeats the entire purpose of autonomy. It’s not scalable. It’s not cost-effective. And it’s certainly not the breakthrough that Musk has been promising for a decade.
Think about it: if the system were truly ready for unsupervised operation, why would you need someone in a trailing car ready to intervene? The chase car exists because Tesla knows the system isn’t ready to operate without a human safety net.
Click over to see the evidence. This is not only unsustainable from a cost perspective, it means that everyone hailing one of these things is now responsible for there being two cars on the road. That doesn’t sound like a good way for autonomous vehicles to achieve the goal of reducing traffic. I’ve got another story in the queue that takes a closer look at the claims about how autonomous vehicles will increase safety on the road, and this is of a piece with the way that author analyzed those assertions. For now, the bottom line remains that Elno is full of it.