This City Is Letting Tesla's Robotaxis Drive Unsupervised

Last week, Tesla announced its long-gestating, highly controversial Robotaxis would start operating in Austin "unsupervised." (In other words, without a human safety monitor inside the car.) The company's CEO Elon Musk made the carefully worded announcement himself on Thursday: "just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car." Tesla's official account did something similar, calling the rides "full unsupervised." Some in the tech and financial worlds clearly saw it as an autonomy breakthrough, sending Tesla share price up by more than 4%.

Of course, as with most Tesla claims that sound too good to be true, the company's talk of "unsupervised" rides might not be what it sounds like. Pay attention to how Musk worded it: "no safety monitor in the car." The more we see from other Austin riders, the more we learn about the catch. While the Robotaxis don't have a safety monitor physically riding in the vehicle, it doesn't seem like they're traveling "full unsupervised," either. In reality, it looks like the human safety monitors are still involved... just riding in another car behind the Robotaxi.

In one X user's video, you get a full, 14-minute look at a ride from Point A to Point B inside a Model Y Robotaxi. At face value, the footage backs the "unsupervised" claim. But while Musk's statement that there is "no safety monitor in the car" may be technically accurate, the implication that Tesla has accomplished fully unsupervised driving is impossible to verify from the footage alone. Pair this with the fact that neither Musk nor Tesla has publicly explained the purpose of the following vehicles, it's not a massive leap to assume they're there to intervene if something goes wrong. In other words, not really unsupervised.

True unsupervised autonomy, which you'll actually get from Tesla competitor Waymo, would mean the vehicle can operate without chase cars or humans there on standby as backup. Waymo's autonomous vehicles run alone across multiple U.S. cities and have logged tens of millions of fully unsupervised miles, And not without plenty of problems of their own, of course. They have had their share of troubles in San Francisco, for example. Nevertheless: For now, Tesla's only doing their so-called unsupervised rides in Austin.