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A few days ago, I reported on Elon Musk’s statement that driverless Tesla robotaxis without human safety monitors would be on the road in Austin, Texas, within a few weeks — just before the end of 2025.
Well, earlier today, two such vehicles were spotted in Austin — but without customers in them.
Elon Musk confirmed in response to one of the posts about this, “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car.”
A driverless Tesla Robotaxi was spotted on the roads of Austin, Texas today.
No one in the car. No safety driver.
Fully autonomous.
This is actually happening.
pic.twitter.com/MSmRaeyJwj
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) December 14, 2025
At least two vehicles with different license plates have been spotted driving without a human behind the wheel. It’s not clear how many such vehicles are driving around, though.
Something that confused me, and some others, is why Tesla would need to test self-driving like this without a human monitor onboard. If you have a driver inside to monitor and he or she doesn’t need to intervene at all, how is that not adequate enough to confirm the tech is ready? Perhaps there’s some kind of small print in the regulations that requires this kind of testing before shuttling passengers around without a human safety monitor onboard … but that just seems weird.
I know many people are skeptical, especially after nearly a decade of missed targets, massively missed targets, and clearly false statements from Elon Musk on this topic. However, it does appear the tech is about to go human-less to some degree.
Of course, there is still the question of how ready the tech is. You can go 1,000 miles or 10,000 miles or even 100,000 miles driverless without an accident, but that doesn’t mean the tech is really ready. As Mike Barnard has pointed out, “For autonomy to be proven safe across many environments, the dataset will need to reach into the billions of miles and include a broader range of contexts.” (emphasis added) He was referring to findings from Waymo that it showed safer driving and less human injury after 100 million rider-only miles.
This is a key point. From what we’ve seen so far, it appears Tesla has had at least 7 robotaxi accidents with fewer than 30 robotaxis on the road in Austin. Those could all be from a previous version of FSD, and perhaps the latest version is much better. However, frankly, we really don’t know, and neither does Tesla. It hasn’t logged enough miles to defeat the law of small numbers. Nonetheless, it appears Tesla is going to take its stat collection to completely human-less robotaxi operations soon.
On that point, how things proceed from here probably depend a lot on how many accidents without human safety monitors occur and what the public and regulatory reactions to them are. If there are a fairly high number of them, there could be a strong response. If there is a very strong response, regulations could even be put in place to clamp down on robotaxi driving.
It appears that one key reason Elon Musk cozied up to Donald Trump was to avoid hurdles with robotaxi deployment, and to make regulations around them as lenient and loose as possible. At the moment, Musk seems to be on good terms with Trump, so I think we can expect limited to no interference from the NHTSA. It’s all “pay to play” in the Trump administration, and Musk has paid his modern mafia dues. However, we will see how things develop on the national, state, and local level if when accidents occur.
Any guesses on how many driverless Tesla robotaxis will be deployed for commercial service in 2026? I imagine guesses will range from zero to several million. And forecasts about what happens after they are deployed are likely even more divergent. It seems 2026 will be an interesting year for this topic one way or another….
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