Tesla robotaxis spotted on public roads without safety monitors

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.

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.