The automaker has begun testing a robotaxis without human safety drivers on board after years of promises.
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Tesla is testing its Model Y robotaxis in Austin, Texas, without human safety drivers inside.
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Elon Musk said this month that truly driverless robotaxis in Austin were only “three weeks away.”
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A wider passenger launch is on the horizon, but the exact date remains unclear.
Tesla has begun testing its Model Y robotaxis in Austin without human safety monitoring on board. The robotaxis available to paying passengers still have human supervisors on board. Still, it’s a crucial step forward for the automaker that is betting its future on autonomous vehicles, AI and humanoid robots.
On the X social media platform of Elon Musk, a Tesla fan who goes by the handle name of Mandablorian first posted the video of a black Model Y running smoothly on the streets of Austin without any passengers inside. The clip appears to have gone viral among Tesla cheerleaders on X, with Musk later confirming that testing of the robotaxi was underway without 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 phase out human drivers from the equation, it will be a real test of the underlying FSD software, which has been far from perfect so far. The Model Ys autonomously brakes, turns, accelerates and navigates complex traffic scenarios with confidence in most cases.
But there were cases of breaking traffic rules, as evidenced by several videos recorded by passengers online. Since the human-supervised robotaxis rolled into Austin earlier this year, Tesla also reported seven crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Tesla FSD
Meanwhile, rival Waymo is expanding rapidly. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi service is now operating 450,000 driverless cars each week across Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta. That’s an 80% increase from the 250,000 rides the company disclosed six months ago. It plans to expand to 11 more US cities by the end of 2026.
Waymo’s safety record isn’t perfect either. More 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 at his company’s xAI hackathon event last week, Musk said robotaxis without human safety drivers will arrive in Austin in about three weeks. “Unsupervised Full-Self Driving is pretty much settled at this point, we’re just going through validation right now,” he added. I take this with a grain of salt—Musk himself has said before that he tends to be overly optimistic with timelines.
Anyway, this year has been great for robotaxis. Tesla is finally starting to deliver on what it has promised for more than a decade, even if its operations are still relatively small. Waymo has grown rapidly and many new players have 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 set to be even bigger and you can decide if self-driving vehicles are just a very expensive science project or something that can really scale and drive profits for these companies, while also giving safe and affordable rides for passengers.
Do you have a tip? Contact the author: suvrat.kothari@insideevs.com