Image: Tesla
Tesla has “pretty much solved” unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD), according to CEO Elon Musk, who offered a confident update on the company’s autonomous driving push during a virtual Q&A at this week’s xAI hackathon in Palo Alto. Musk responded to a participant asking about the long-awaited unsupervised version of FSD, delivering one of his most optimistic timelines yet for driverless Teslas.
Musk said Tesla plans to launch Robotaxis without safety monitors in Austin in roughly three weeks. That would mark a major leap from today’s pilot program, which currently runs with no one in the driver’s seat but still requires a safety monitor in the passenger seat. Back in September, Musk promised those monitors would be removed before the end of the year — and based on his latest comments, that timeline could very well hold.
“We’re just going through validation right now,” Musk said, adding that unsupervised operation will initially run on a relatively small FSD model. He also teased a significantly larger version — an order of magnitude bigger — coming in January or February 2026. The expanded model will incorporate more reasoning and reinforcement learning, representing what Musk implied is the next major step toward scalable autonomy.
He went even further, suggesting Tesla may need to build its own chip fab to support future AI demands. To reach hundreds of gigawatts of AI compute per year, Musk said, existing industry capacity won’t come online fast enough.
These comments arrive just weeks after Musk told shareholders Tesla was only “a few months away” from unsupervised FSD. The company has been aggressively iterating FSD throughout 2025, rolling out improvements designed to increase both capability and adoption. The latest point release, FSD 14.2.1, even lets drivers text while behind the wheel when conditions allow — a strong indication of where Tesla believes its supervised-to-unsupervised transition stands. Musk also previously described FSD 14.3, due out in the coming weeks, as the “last big piece” of the autonomy puzzle.
With Tesla Robotaxis potentially going fully rider-only in Austin within weeks, a larger FSD model on the horizon, and talk of a Tesla chip fab, Musk’s confidence suggests the company is accelerating toward a milestone it has been chasing for nearly a decade.
