Tesla has two days to remove Robotaxi safety drivers in Austin to reach Elon Musk’s repeated goal

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said that the company would remove the safety drivers from its Austin Robotaxi service by year’s end:

September X post: “The safety driver is just there for the first few months to be extra safe. Should be no safety driver by end of year.”

October earnings call: “We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year, so within a few months.”

December xAI Hackathon: “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks.”

With just two days left in the year, there’s still no indication that Tesla has begun offering driverless Robotaxi rides to the public — despite Musk’s repeated assurances that it would.

So far, reports are limited to Tesla employees, friends of the company, and Musk himself testing unsupervised rides around Austin.

While the year-end deadline is an arbitrary one, the goal is a very important milestone for Tesla and its shareholders. A true driverless Robotaxi service would be proof of concept for the company’s Full Self-Driving software, the tech that’s supposed to elevate Tesla above the regular automakers and help justify its roughly $1.5 trillion valuation. For Tesla, it signifies no less than the future of the company and of transportation more broadly.

And the delay suggests some bumps in the road. Back in October, Musk gave a caveat to the goal of removing safety drivers by saying, “We’re obviously being very cautious about the deployment. So, our goal is to be actually paranoid about deployment because, obviously, even one accident will be front-page headline news worldwide. So, it’s better for us to take a cautious approach here.”

Of the roughly 30 Robotaxis operating in Austin, eight of them have crashed since June, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, despite only a handful operating at a time. That suggests the service may still be far riskier than human drivers on a per-vehicle or per-mile basis, despite Tesla’s claims to the contrary.

Musk has also promised the Robotaxi program would expand to 8 to 10 cities this year, down from a previous goal this summer of serving half the US population. He also said there would be 1,500 Robotaxis in service across the Bay Area and Austin by year-end. Currently there are about 160 in service in total, data from Robotaxi Tracker shows.

Musk, of course, has a history of being notoriously wrong on his own timelines. Still, this goal is certainly an important one.