Tesla Robotaxis Appear Fully Driverless in Austin

Tesla's Robotaxi fleet in Austin appears to be running with no safety monitor in the car — but the claim comes from a crowdsourced tracking site, not from Tesla.

Ethan McKanna, creator of the site Robotaxi Tracker, told The Verge that all 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin his site monitored over the past two weeks were unsupervised. Those rides involved 54 different cars.

"Austin has seemingly stopped supervised rides for a couple weeks now," McKanna told The Verge. "Plates previously marked as supervised have been confirmed to be offering unsupervised rides."

Tesla did not respond to The Verge's requests for comment. The company does not publish detailed fleet data and typically does not answer press inquiries, which is why a crowdsourced site is one of the few ways to see what the fleet is doing.

What The Tracker Actually Shows

Robotaxi Tracker draws primarily on app users automatically logging their rides, plus other crowdsourced and public information. It is not an official count.

McKanna, who spent this summer interning with Tesla's Robotaxi team, said some metrics on his site had been lagging. After revising the data sources feeding the tracker, he found more vehicles operating unsupervised than the site had previously shown, and he is updating the site with the revised figures.

That revision explains part of an eye-catching jump. As recently as last week, the tracker showed just 28 active unsupervised vehicles across six Texas and Florida markets. McKanna has now identified nearly twice that many unsupervised Teslas in Austin alone, and says roughly 30 driverless Teslas have been operating in Dallas and Houston over the past week.

The Verge reports the Austin shift itself appears to be real, and that the tracker's findings line up with what Robotaxi users in the Austin area have posted on Reddit and X.

Engadget, covering The Verge's report, noted a reason for caution: it was reported earlier this year that some Robotaxi rides that appeared to be unsupervised were at times connected to remote human drivers.

Why It Matters Now

Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab, its purpose-built robotaxi, in Austin as soon as this month. Reuters reported Tesla has told employees it is gearing up for a release this month, starting with rides for employees.

Unlike the Model Ys currently carrying passengers, the Cybercab is designed without a steering wheel or pedals — so there is no way to put a human monitor behind the wheel. Getting cars to run without an onboard supervisor is a precondition for the rollout, not a nice-to-have.

Tesla may also be throttling the current fleet in the meantime. A JPMorgan note cited by The Verge says Tesla is intentionally holding back on adding Model Ys to the Robotaxi fleet because it expects to scale Cybercab in the near term.