Tesla has officially crossed a line it’s been promising for years. As of today, the company has opened fully unsupervised Robotaxi rides to the general public in Austin, Texas, with no safety monitor inside the vehicle. For the first time, members of the public can hail a Tesla Robotaxi running Full Self-Driving Unsupervised, relying entirely on cameras and AI.
One of the very first public riders was former Tesla AI engineer @Tsla99T, who posted simply, “I am in a robotaxi without safety monitor,” marking what is likely the first publicly documented unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi ride outside of Tesla’s internal testing group. Until now, Tesla’s Austin Robotaxi fleet — currently estimated at around 50 vehicles — had been operating without drivers but with a human safety monitor seated in the passenger seat. Today’s change removes that final layer of human oversight, making the service truly autonomous.
Tesla’s AI chief Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the rollout, writing, “Robotaxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.” For now, only a handful of Model Ys running FSD Unsupervised are available to the public, but Tesla says more vehicles will be added as confidence grows.
The move builds on Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi testing in Austin that began last month, followed by internal-only unsupervised rides for employees, which produced the first footage of driverless trips with no one in the front seat. Today’s expansion fulfills Elon Musk’s long-standing claim that Tesla would eventually remove even safety monitors from its Robotaxi service.
Image: Tesla
Early details from riders suggest that the cars remain locked into autonomous mode. Tugging on the steering wheel triggers an on-screen warning, but does not give the passenger control. Continued interference reportedly causes the vehicle to safely pull over.
It’s worth noting that the Robotaxi fleet is running more advanced Full Self-Driving builds than what’s currently available to consumers. While Musk has said that current-gen AI4-equipped Teslas won’t need hardware upgrades to access unsupervised FSD in the future, the public version of FSD remains supervised, even as Tesla experiments with features like allowing drivers to text under specific conditions.
For now, Austin is ground zero. Tesla is officially the first company to offer fully autonomous rides to the general public with no safety monitors and using only cameras — no LiDAR, no radar.
