Just about six months after Tesla began testing its nascent robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, the company is now driving the cars around the city without safety monitors.
Removing the human safety monitor allows the company to take an important step closer to its goal of launching an actual commercial robotaxi service, a step that has been years in the making.
CEO Elon Musk has spent nearly a decade promising that Tesla cars would become fully self-driving with a simple software update. Now, he’s on the brink of launching a service to compete with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, which he said last week: “We never had a chance against Tesla.”
The removal of the safety monitors will likely lead to even more scrutiny of Tesla’s ongoing tests in Austin, and even more scrutiny if Tesla begins offering empty rides. Tesla’s small-scale test fleet has been involved in at least seven crashes since June. Few details of the accident are known as the company is actively compiling its report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Videos of completely empty Tesla Model Y SUVs began circulating on social media over the weekend, and on Sunday, Musk confirmed that his company was conducting tests “without occupants.” Neither Mr. Musk nor Tesla has said how quickly they plan to move toward offering customers rides without safety monitors. The company’s own X account offered a hint in a post Sunday night: “Slowly and then all at once.” Ashok Elswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, wrote, “And so it begins!”
In June, Tesla began offering rides to select influencers and customers in Austin, allowing an employee to sit in the passenger seat if the car did something dangerous. These safety monitors moved to the driver’s seat in September. Since then, the company has eliminated its waiting list and gradually expanded its service area to cover most of the Austin metropolitan area. However, the size of the vehicle never exceeded about 25 to 30 cars, by most fans’ calculations.
Musk has maintained that Tesla will operate its own robotaxi fleet, saying in July that he believes the fleet will cover “half the population of the United States” by the end of this year. That outrageous goal, like many Musk has set over the years, was revised in November when Tesla claimed it would nearly double its existing Austin vehicle fleet to about 60 vehicles.
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Tesla has been testing a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco area in recent months where drivers use the company’s advanced driver-assistance software. California has regulations that require Tesla to combine multiple permits if it wants to offer fully driverless driving in the state. Texas, on the other hand, is not.
Musk has also talked a lot over the years about allowing Tesla owners to add their own cars to the company’s robotaxi fleet. In 2016, Tesla even promised that every car it makes would have all the necessary hardware to eventually become self-driving. That was a mistake, and the blog post has since been removed from Tesla’s website (the company is facing numerous legal challenges over it). Tesla has considered multiple versions of the hardware that powers its driver-assistance software. That means, as Musk himself acknowledged in January, there are millions of cars on the road that need upgrading.
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