Tesla is preparing for its Robotaxis to go fully driverless and ditch its human safety monitors, according to CEO Elon Musk, while the rest of us prepare for an accident.
Over the weekend, footage circulated on social media showing at least two different Tesla Robotaxis roaming the streets of Austin, Texas, without anyone in the driver’s seat. Musk soon stepped in to confirm what his fans were seeing.
“Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” Musk wrote in a tweet Sunday.
If true, then the automaker is finally gearing up to belatedly deliver on Musk’s grand promise to get rid of the safety monitors, who have always been a conspicuous and embarrassing inclusion, by the end of 2025. Musk has insisted that Tesla included monitors because it was “paranoid” about safety, but the service’s delayed launch this June, plus Tesla’s struggles with its existing self-driving tech, added to the feeling that they were really there to paper over the Robotaxi’s dubious capabilities.
That the safety monitors are now set to be removed will raise serious questions about whether the tech is reliable enough to operate on its own. The human supervisors have already had to make a number of interventions to prevent a potential accident or stop them breaking road laws. They’ve even taken complete control of the vehicles on occasion.
It doesn’t help that Tesla isn’t nearly as transparent about its tech as robot cab leader Waymo. Tesla heavily censors its crash reports sent to regulators under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” making it impossible to determine what occurred during the accidents. Many of the reports come in months after the fact, and the automaker has been investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to report crashes on time.
The data that we are privy to, though, isn’t flattering. As of this week, as spotted by Electrek, the automaker has reported eight crashes since launching the service in late June (and to give an idea of how tardy the updates are, the latest reported crash occurred in October.) Four crashes occurred in a single month.
Electrek crunched the numbers and estimated that based on Tesla’s November announcement that its fleet had traveled a combined 250,000 miles, the Robotaxis were crashing once every 40,000 miles. For comparison, Waymo’s over 2,500 autonomous taxis, which operate across several major metropolitan areas, like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Austin, have racked up over 100 million fully driverless miles — with no safety monitor or driver — and crash every 98,600 miles on average, per Electrek.
All that being said, Musk has a storied track record of making grand promises he can’t deliver on. Originally, he declared that the Robotaxi service would launch with fully “unsupervised” rides with “no one in the car,” thus making it a huge embarrassment when the cabs eventually rolled out with safety monitors’ in the front passenger seat.
Musk also claimed that over 1,000 Tesla Robotaxis would be patrolling Austin “within a few months” of launching, and estimated that over a million self-driving Teslas would be deployed across the US by the end of 2026 after he releases the Robotaxi software to Tesla owners. Right now, there’s only around 30 Robotaxis in operation.
In other words, we wouldn’t put it past Musk to yoink the safety monitors, but it could very well be the case he’s just throwing a bone to his fans-slash-investors to keep stringing them along. And it worked: Tesla shares soared by up to five percent to an almost year-high after Musk’s announcement, Reuters reported.
“The news Tesla is testing Robotaxis without the safety monitors is in line with our expectations that the company is making progress in its testing, in line with management’s statements during the third quarter earnings call,” Seth Goldstein, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told the newswire. “The market is cheering the progress.”
More on robotaxis: Waymo’s Software Patch to Not Run Down Children Getting Off School Buses Isn’t Working, School Claims
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