is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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After years of false promises and missed deadlines, several Tesla vehicles have been spotted over the weekend driving autonomously without safety monitors on public roads in Austin.
For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin, and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.
Musk has said that the human monitors are only there because Tesla is being “paranoid about safety,” and not because of some deficiency in the company’s technology. He later predicted that the company would remove the safety monitors by the end of 2025.
Now Musk appears to be making good on that promise. Videos of two separate robotaxis seen operating without any occupants in the front seat were posted to X on Sunday, with Musk later confirming that autonomous testing in Austin had commenced.
The news comes as Waymo widens its lead over Tesla, reporting over 14 million paid rides in 2025 alone and plans to expand to 20 new cities in the coming year. Despite that, Musk has continued to insist that Tesla holds the advantage over the Alphabet-owned robotaxi operator due to its vast customer fleet that he insists will soon become fully autonomous. This, of course, ignores the reality that most Teslas on the road lack the necessary hardware to support fully autonomous driving.
While Tesla is clearly making progress on fulfilling Musk’s promises of unsupervised driving before the end of the year, the company has yet to put any paying customers in one of these vehicles, nor has it released any safety data that compares its technology to human driving benchmarks. There has been a plethora of anecdotal evidence, mostly from pro-Tesla influencers who have used the service, but obviously this falls far short of comprehensive, verifiable data of the vehicles’ performance.