Musk says Tesla takes safety supervisors out of some Austin Robotaxis
A Tesla robotaxi drives down the street along South Congress Boulevard in Austin, Texas, on June 22, 2025
Joel Angel Juarez | Reuters
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that his company is currently operating a small number of Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, without a human driver or safety officer on board.
“I just started Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin without a safety monitor in the car,” Musk said on X. “Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI team!”
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of software, wrote in a separate post that the Austin Robotaxi service includes “several unsupervised vehicles mixed into the larger robotaxi fleet with safety monitors.” He said that the ratio of driverless vehicles to supervised vehicles in this market will increase over time.
Tesla shares closed 4.2% higher at $449.36 on Thursday.
Tesla currently lags behind many companies that operate commercial robotaxi services with no drivers or safety monitors. alphabet Waymo leads the US market Baidu’s Apollo Go is ahead with serious competition in China WeRide.
Other players join the fight Amazon’s Zoox currently operates a limited number of driverless services in the US, and startups such as May Mobility and Nuro are developing their driverless offerings.
Elon Musk waves to the crowd at the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, 2026.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Musk said in July that Tesla would likely have “half the US population using autonomous driving by the end of the year.” The company fell far short of this goal.
But Tesla has turned up the excitement with the launch of its Robotaxi ride-hailing app and its first services in Austin and the San Francisco Bay area.
Tesla has received permission to operate a transportation network company in Texas, allowing it to use “automated driving systems,” or driverless vehicles, there. But in California, Tesla has not yet received permits that would allow it to conduct self-driving tests or robotaxi rides without a human at the steering wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.
“I think driverless cars are essentially a solved problem at this point,” Musk said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, adding that he expects his company’s Robotaxi service to be “very common in the US by the end of this year.”
Musk is notorious for missing self-imposed timelines for major technical or business achievements.
He told investors in 2019 that he was “very confident” the company could convert its existing vehicles into robotaxis with a software update by the end of next year.
With EV sales slumping, Tesla’s ability to excite investors may depend on whether it can scale its self-driving ride-hailing service in the U.S. this year and upgrade the partially automated driving systems in its cars to fully automated driving. Today its premium system is marketed as FSD (Supervised) and the company plans to sell the FSD Unsupervised system in the future.
Surveys conducted by Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report The survey conducted late last year found that the majority of US consumers did not want to take a robotaxi, mainly due to safety concerns.
Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note this week that they expect “underlying volume growth to slow” for Tesla and the electric vehicle maker rivya this year with “autonomy and physical AI driving the narrative.” They also said, “Tesla will need to prove that FSD is unregulated and that robotaxi has been scaled up (clearly behind schedule in our view) before receiving increased valuation credit.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Late last year, regulators in California found Tesla engaged in misleading marketing and false advertising about its vehicles’ self-driving capabilities. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration currently under investigation Tesla will determine how often the company’s FSD systems can cause traffic safety violations.
Accordingly TeslaDeaths.comUsing NHTSA data, regulatory filings and press reports to track fatal Tesla crashes, 65 people died in Tesla crashes involving the use of autopilot; two of these were incidents in which the company’s FSD systems were activated in the seconds before the crash.
Tesla is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.
WRISTWATCH: Tesla brings Full Self-Driving feature to monthly subscription
