Tesla starts testing robotaxis in Austin with no safety driver

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.