Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions just hit a major milestone in Austin, Texas. After six months of cautious testing, the company is now sending its Model Y fleet cruising the city’s streets completely empty, no safety drivers, no passengers, no humans at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the move on X over the weekend, replying to viral videos of a lone Tesla Model Y navigating Austin traffic with “testing with no occupants.” It’s the latest flex in Musk’s decade-long quest to prove Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech can go truly driverless, a service he’s pitched as a Waymo-killer. Last week, he even brushed off Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle leader as having “never really had a chance against Tesla.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, summed it up succinctly: “And so it begins!” The company’s official X account teased what’s next: “Slowly, then all at once.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions just hit a major milestone in Austin, Texas. After six months of cautious testing, the company is now sending its Model Y fleet cruising the city’s streets completely empty, no safety drivers, no passengers, no humans at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Videos of the driverless SUVs popped up on social media over the weekend, quickly going viral. Musk’s confirmation on X<\/a> lit a fire under Tesla watchers, while Elluswamy’s post<\/a> and the company’s cryptic tease<\/a> signal big things ahead. No word yet on when paying customers can hop in unsupervised rides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Austin pilot launched in June with rides for handpicked influencers and early fans, an employee riding shotgun as a safety monitor ready to grab the wheel. By September<\/a>, that monitor slid into the driver’s seat. Tesla ditched waitlists, expanded the geofence to blanket much of greater Austin, but kept the fleet tiny\u2014fan counts peg it at 25-30 cars max.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also Read: Tesla could have avoided that $242.5M Autopilot verdict, filings show<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, with humans fully out of the equation, expect the spotlight to burn hotter. Tesla’s test vehicles have racked up at least seven crashes<\/a> since June, per reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Details? Scant, thanks to Tesla’s aggressive redactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk has hyped Tesla’s in-house robotaxi fleet as the endgame. In July, he claimed it’d cover “half of the U.S. population” by year-end. November brought a reality check<\/a>: Double the Austin fleet to around 60 vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elsewhere, Tesla’s testing supervised ride-hailing in the Bay Area using its driver-assist software. But California’s permit thicket blocks fully driverless ops without a fight, Texas, by contrast, stays hands-off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n