Tesla Robotaxis appear to go fully unsupervised in Austin ahead of Cybercab launch
The Verge Rani Molla ● Covered by 2 sources
Tesla’s Austin robotaxis now seem fully driverless. A tracker saw 170 straight rides without safety monitors, and the same pattern is spreading beyond Austin.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Rani Molla — read the original for the full story.
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Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin appears to have crossed a line it had only talked around before: the rides now seem to be happening with no human safety monitor onboard at all.
That’s based on the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker, whose creator, Ethan McKanna, told The Verge that every one of the 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides it logged in Austin over the past two weeks was unsupervised. Those trips involved 54 different cars.
And Austin is no longer the only place where that’s showing up. McKanna has also seen a sharp rise in unsupervised Robotaxis in Dallas and Houston, where about 30 driverless Teslas have been operating over the past week.
The shift is a big one from earlier this summer, when Tesla’s driverless ambitions still seemed more partial and more hedged. Now the pattern looks harder to dismiss: the cars are showing up without the backup driver, and they’re doing it in more than one Texas city.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Tesla being Tesla: ship the headline first, sort out the edges later, then act surprised when everyone notices. If the cars really are going out without monitors in more than one city, that’s not a demo anymore — it’s a claim about readiness, and those are much easier to make than to earn.
Read more about this at: The Verge