Tesla Starts Robotaxi Rides With No Safety Monitors in Austin

For a long time, full self-driving Teslas felt like something always coming next year. This week, that changed in a real and visible way.

Tesla has officially launched robotaxi rides in Austin with no human safety monitor inside the vehicle. The only people in the car are the passengers. The driving is handled entirely by the system.

The update was confirmed by Elon Musk, who posted on X that Tesla robotaxis are now operating in Austin without a safety monitor and congratulated the company’s AI team.

“Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car. Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team!”

This matters because earlier versions of Tesla’s robotaxi service still relied on a human presence. When the program launched last year in Austin, a monitor sat in the front passenger seat. In California’s Bay Area, Tesla robotaxis still operate with safety drivers behind the wheel. Austin is the first city where Tesla has taken that extra step.

Some early rider videos shared online show a chase vehicle following the robotaxi. That suggests Tesla is watching these trips closely as the system gains real-world miles. It is a cautious rollout, and that is exactly what you would expect at this stage.

The vehicles being used are Tesla Model Y robotaxis running a more advanced version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. Tesla says the cars are mechanically identical to customer vehicles. The difference comes down to software and how it is deployed.

Austin has become Tesla’s autonomy proving ground for a reason. The city offers wide roads, predictable layouts, and a regulatory environment that supports testing new mobility tech. It is also where Tesla builds vehicles and develops much of its autonomy stack. Running driverless rides there keeps feedback loops tight.

Scaling will happen slowly. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s autonomous vehicle program, said the company is starting with a small number of unsupervised vehicles mixed into a larger fleet that still includes safety monitors. Over time, that ratio will increase. This gradual approach reflects how hard the final stretch of autonomy really is.

The comparison everyone makes is with Waymo, owned by Alphabet. Waymo already delivers around 450,000 paid autonomous rides per week and operates in multiple U.S. cities, with more launches planned this year. Waymo relies on lidar, radar, and dense sensor suites, while Tesla continues to push a camera-first approach powered by neural networks.

These robotaxis use vehicles that look and feel like the ones many people already drive. That reinforces Tesla’s long-held idea that autonomy scales through software updates rather than specialized hardware.

The open question is timing. Musk has said the robotaxis use a more advanced version of Full Self-Driving than what customers have today, even though the hardware is the same. Bridging that gap from fleet testing to personal ownership remains the milestone to watch.

Tesla plans to expand its robotaxi network further with the upcoming Cybercab, a vehicle designed specifically for autonomous ride-hailing. Austin is the starting point, not the finish line.

Source: InsideEvs