Earlier this year, Elon Musk promised that Tesla's robotaxis would launch offering fully "unsupervised" rides with "no one in the car."
That turned out to be a lie. And less than a week into the robotaxi service's debut, which is currently limited to a tiny geofenced area in Austin, Texas, it's already become apparent that the self-driving cars are very much reliant on the human supervisors — or "safety monitors" — that Musk was adamant he wouldn't need.
In an incident shared on Wednesday, a popular Tesla content creator who goes by the handle "Dirty Tesla" said that after his robotaxi ride dropped him off, the vehicle struggled to exit the tight parking lot and appeared to back up into a parked car.
After that car left, according to Dirty Tesla, the safety monitor got out of the front passenger seat, climbed into the driver's seat to take over, and then drove away.
Footage uploaded to X shows the robotaxi abruptly stopping while trying to squeeze its way out and flashing its hazard lights — a sign that the safety monitor manually intervened. The video doesn't show the human supervisor taking over the vehicle. But if Dirty Tesla's account is true, it sounds like labelling them as merely safety "monitors" may be a little misleading, if they're having to actually drive the cars.
"I wouldn't even call this unsupervised," Dirty Tesla wrote in a reply to his video. "It's clearly supervised."
Super tight squeeze for robotaxi in one of my last drives 🫢 The owner of the parked car asked if it was my car and I told him it was a robotaxi. The robotaxi backed up and then the driver of the parked car left. It looked like the tire touched the parked car. The safety driver… pic.twitter.com/DzNuAQk6Su — Dirty Tesla (@DirtyTesLa) June 25, 2025
Prior to the launch, Tesla kept many details of its robotaxi service under wraps, and avoided even offering a hard launch date. The inclusion of the safety monitors, who sit in the front passenger seat instead of the driver's, wasn't revealed until the automaker started sending invites to testers just days ahead of the debut.
The news immediately raised eyebrows. Beyond contradicting Musk's earlier promise, it's unusual for a robotaxi service to still require human employees in the vehicles during the commercial phase of operations, TechCrunch noted, which Tesla — charging an eye-rolling $4.20 per ride — immediately jumped into.
Meanwhile, the automaker has remained suspiciously opaque about the extent that its robotaxis would rely on "teleoperators," or human employees located offsite but ready to remotely pilot the vehicles. It's not clear why the safety monitor elected to take over the robotaxi that dropped off Dirty Tesla, instead of allowing a teleoperator to take charge.
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