When Tesla launched its Robotaxi service last summer, it came with an embarrassing caveat. Sitting in the front of each of the vehicles were human “safety monitors” who stuck out like sore thumbs — contradicting CEO Elon Musk’s promises that the service would hit the road fully driverless. That the silent human employees sat in the front passenger seat, instead of the driver’s, only served to further underscore how Musk had speciously weaseled his way out being true to his word.
Now, over half a year into the service’s launch, Musk insists that Robotaxis will start giving rides in Austin, Texas “with no safety monitor in the car,” he announced on his website X on Thursday. This comes about a month after fans spotted several of the cabs driving around without any occupants, prompting Musk to confirm that fully driverless testing was underway.
But hold your horses and runaway self-driving cars, because this appears to be another bit of deception. The EV blog Electrek reports that instead of supervising from inside the vehicle, it now appears that the safety monitors are simply watching from a car that follows the Robotaxis throughout their entire trips — a Rube Goldberg-style workaround that illustrates the lengths Musk will go to keep up a charade of progress.
According to Electrek, this new operating procedure can be seen in a vlog shared by Tesla enthusiast Joe Tegtmeyer on Thursday, which shows two black Teslas conspicuously tailing the red Robotaxi. Tegtmeyer himself comments on it during the video, calling them a “chase car” that he suspects are there for “validation.”
Tesla has struggled to refine its self-driving technology, including its Robotaxi software. The driverless-but-not-quite-superviserless cabs have already gotten into numerous accidents, have been spotted ignoring speed limits and other traffic laws, on top of instances of driving dangerously or erratically. The human monitors have also been forced to make interventions to prevent a potential accident, and have even at times taken complete control of the vehicles.
Musk once said Tesla was being “paranoid” about Robotaxi safety, and the automaker is clearly caught in a tug of war in which it knows that its tech isn’t ready for primetime, but also has to show some semblance of keeping up with Musk’s promised timelines, which include claiming that the Robotaxi service would have over 1,000 cars in its fleet “within a few months” — it currently only has around 30 — and that over a million self-driving Teslas would be deployed across the US by the end of 2026.
His latest announcement only highlighted that there was “no safety monitor in the car” and made no mention of the tailing vehicles. While you can’t fault Tesla for going the safe route by still supervising its cabs, absurd as its new methods are, it’s clearly misleading its fans and investors into thinking it’s on the pathway to full autonomy. Having an extra vehicle tail every Robotaxi obviously can’t be scaled up if those promised thousands end up roaming cities across the country.
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