After years of false promises and missed deadlines, several Tesla vehicles were spotted driving autonomously without safety monitors on public roads in Austin over the weekend.
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 doesn’t currently require for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and the driver’s seat in San Francisco. Neither service is yet fully open to the public, instead relying on a customer waitlist.
Musk has said that the human monitors are only there because Tesla is “going crazy about safety”, not because of some flaw in the company’s technology. He later predicted that the company would remove the security monitor by the end of 2025.
While Tesla is clearly making progress in delivering on Musk’s promises of unsupervised driving before the end of the year, the company has not yet placed a paying customer in any of these vehicles, nor has it released any safety data that compares its technology to human driving benchmarks. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, mostly from pro-Tesla influencers who have used the service, but obviously it falls far short of comprehensive, verifiable data on the vehicles’ performance.
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