Autobayng News Team
After many promises from Tesla CEO Elon Musk of self-driving Teslas “this year,” it looks like 2026 is finally the ticket. Tesla on Thursday launched Robotaxi rides in Austin without a human safety monitor inside the car.
In an X post, Musk confirmed that the automaker’s taxi service is now operating without anybody in the car apart from passengers. “Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car. Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team!,” he said.
When the operation launched last June in Austin, the company had monitors sitting up front in the passenger’s seat. Tesla’s ride-hailing service in the California Bay Area has safety drivers behind the wheel. In one video from a rider posted online, it appears that Tesla had a chase car following the driverless taxi.
It may all be happening a few years late—Musk once said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis in operation by 2020—but this is nonetheless a huge milestone for the company, which has had its sights set on offering self-driving capability to the public for around a decade.
The next big question is how quickly Tesla can safely scale its autonomous service and expand to new territory. The company plans to start producing steering wheel-free Cybercabs in April to help fuel the Robotaxi network’s growth. The Tesla Cybercab Photo by: Motor1.com
The rollout of monitor-free Model Ys will be slow at first, said Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s autonomous vehicle program.
“Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time,” he said in a post on X. His post also confirms that the rides are available to the public.
Tesla will need to move quickly if it wants to catch up with the country’s leader in autonomous driving technology: Alphabet’s Waymo. As Tesla doubled down on a camera-only approach to autonomous driving, Waymo has leveraged a bevy of sensors (lidar, radar and so forth) in its cars to make driverless technology that now serves around 450,000 paid rides per week.
Waymo offers autonomous rides in six cities—it launched to the public in Miami on Thursday—and it plans to add at least 20 more metro areas this year.
Another unknown—and the next milestone Tesla fans and investors will be watching for—is when this capability will become available to the general public. Musk has said that the Tesla Model Y cabs in Austin use a more advanced version of its Full Self-Driving software, but that the cars are mechanically identical to customer vehicles.
All along, Tesla’s vision has been to sell self-driving tech to anybody who owns one of its cars, and let them use that technology anywhere. That’ll be a much greater feat.
Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com More EV News We want your opinion! What would you like to see on Insideevs.com? – The InsideEVs team
