Tesla begins testing a robo-taxi in Austin without a safe driver

Just about six months after Tesla began testing its startup Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, the company is now allowing those cars to drive around the city without the need for a safety monitor on board.

Removing the human safety monitors brings the company a crucial step closer to its goal of launching a true commercial Robotaxi service, a move that has been years in the making.

CEO Elon Musk spent nearly a decade promising that Tesla cars were just a software update away from being fully driverless. Now he is about to launch a service aimed at competing with Waymo, the company owned by Alphabet, which he said last week “didn’t have a real chance against Tesla.”

The removal of the safety displays will likely increase scrutiny of Tesla’s ongoing testing in Austin, doubly so when the company begins offering rides in empty cars. Tesla’s small test fleet has been involved in at least seven incidents since June; Few details are known about the accidents because the company is aggressively adjusting its reporting to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

A video of a completely empty Tesla Model Y SUV began circulating on social media over the weekend, and Musk confirmed on Sunday that his company was testing “without passengers.” Neither Musk nor Tesla shared how quickly they plan to move to offer rides to customers without safety oversight. The company’s X account offered a hint in a post Sunday evening: “Slowly, then all at once.” Tesla’s head of artificial intelligence, Ashok Elswami, wrote: “And here you go!”

Tesla began offering rides in Austin to influencers and carefully selected customers in June, with an employee in the passenger seat who can take over if the cars do anything unsafe. These safety displays moved to the driver’s seat in September. Since then, the company has ditched the waiting list and gradually expanded its service area to cover much of the greater Austin metropolitan area. But its fleet size never grew to more than 25 to 30 cars according to most fans’ statistics.

Musk has claimed that Tesla will operate its own fleet of robotaxis, and said in July that he believes this fleet will cover “half the population of the United States” by the end of this year. That outrageous goal, like many Musk has set over the years, has been revised, as he claimed in November that Tesla would nearly double its current fleet in Austin, or about 60 vehicles.

Tesla has been testing its delivery service in the San Francisco area over the past few months, with drivers using the company’s advanced driver assistance software. California has regulations in place, which means Tesla will need to combine multiple permits if it wants to offer fully driverless rides in the state. Texas, on the other hand, doesn’t.

Musk has also talked frequently over the years about allowing Tesla owners to add their personal cars to the company’s Robotaxi fleet. In 2016, he promised that every car Tesla makes would contain all the hardware needed to eventually become autonomous. That was an error, and that blog post has since been removed from Tesla’s website (the company is facing a number of legal challenges over it). Tesla has gone through multiple versions of the hardware that powers its driver-assistance software, which means there are millions of cars on the road that, by Musk’s own admission in January, will need an upgrade.