Tesla runs driverless Robotaxis — no monitor in the car — across US cities

After launching its Robotaxi service in Austin in 2025 with a safety monitor aboard, Tesla began removing the in-car safety monitor from 22 January 2026 — first on a limited share of the fleet, growing over time — putting genuinely driverless, vision-only Teslas carrying paying passengers onto public roads. From April 2026 it extended unsupervised rides to Dallas and Houston, and over the summer to Miami, Orlando and Tampa; by September 2026 the service had passed one million unsupervised miles and begun rolling out the purpose-built Cybercab.

Reaching no-safety-driver operation is the threshold that separates a true autonomous-ride service from an advanced driver-assist demo. Tesla did it with a camera-and-AI approach that, if it generalises, is dramatically cheaper to scale than the lidar-and-HD-map model used by rivals — because the same hardware already ships on millions of consumer cars.

The fleet is still modest in scale and Tesla trails Waymo on total paid trips, so this is an early-stage service rather than a finished one. But crossing from "supervised" to "no one in the driver's seat" on public roads, and then to multiple cities, is the milestone Tesla had promised for years.