Tesla runs truly driverless Robotaxis across Austin

After launching its Robotaxi service in mid-2025 with a safety monitor aboard, Tesla removed the in-car safety monitor entirely on 22 January 2026 — putting genuinely driverless, vision-only Teslas onto public roads carrying paying passengers. By 3 June 2026 the service covered the full Austin metropolitan geofence of roughly 245 square miles, including the airport.

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 small and geofenced, and Tesla trails Waymo on total paid trips, so this is a beginning rather than a finished product. But crossing from "supervised" to "no one in the driver's seat" on public roads is the milestone Tesla had promised for years, and it validates the end-to-end neural-network bet behind FSD v12 and beyond.