Tesla Advances Driverless Robotaxi Tests in Austin

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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.

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.”

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.”

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.

Videos of the driverless SUVs popped up on social media over the weekend, quickly going viral. Musk’s confirmation on X lit a fire under Tesla watchers, while Elluswamy’s post and the company’s cryptic tease signal big things ahead. No word yet on when paying customers can hop in unsupervised rides.

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, 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—fan counts peg it at 25-30 cars max.

Also Read: Tesla could have avoided that $242.5M Autopilot verdict, filings show

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 since June, per reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Details? Scant, thanks to Tesla’s aggressive redactions.

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: Double the Austin fleet to around 60 vehicles.

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.

And don’t forget Musk’s dream of owners tapping into the network with their own cars. That goes back to his infamous 2016 blog post claiming every Tesla had the hardware for full autonomy. Spoiler: It didn’t. Tesla’s since iterated hardware multiple times, admitting in January that millions need retrofits, fueling lawsuits galore.

As Tesla guns for commercial launch, Austin’s empty robotaxis are the proof-of-concept. But with crashes in the rearview and regulators watching, the road ahead stays bumpy.