Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla’s AI team for the milestone.

For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.

Last year, Tesla defied its critics by boldly launching a robotaxi service that, by the end of the year, required no human supervision and was available to over 50 percent of the US population.

At least that’s what Tesla CEO Elon Musk told us would happen by the end of 2025. The reality, of course, was much different.

Last week, Tesla revealed a new section of its website dedicated to reporting safety statistics for its advanced driver assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD).

The new hub appears to be an attempt to move beyond the company’s traditional quarterly safety reports, which have been criticized for failing to account for basic facts about traffic statistics, and toward something more verifiable and reliable. And given that Tesla’s future relies on people trusting its self-driving technology, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the company would be able to remove the safety monitors from its robotaxis “by the end of the year.” He also said Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 8-10 new markets also before the end of 2025.

“We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year,” Musk said in an earnings call with investors. “So within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We’re obviously being very cautious about the deployment.”

For a company that’s staking its future on AI and robotics, Tesla sure is having a tough time explaining its technology to government regulators. The company’s efforts to launch a robotaxi service in San Francisco, which isn’t actually a robotaxi since it features safety drivers in the front seat, is alarming state officials in charge of overseeing autonomous vehicle testing, according to a new report from Reuters.

Emails between Tesla and state officials illustrate the growing sense that the company is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company had yet to apply for any of the needed permits to do so. Instead, the service that Tesla eventually did launch was in vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel to invite-only customers.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is eyeing San Francisco for his next robotaxi city — to which I say, good luck to you, sir.

Musk acknowledged that the company is still waiting on “regulatory approval,” which hints at the uphill climb company Tesla will face in pushing this process forward. (Get it? Uphill? San Francisco?)

Over the years, Tesla has built part of its reputation on hosting big, bold events to generate authentic hype for upcoming releases. The robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, last week wasn’t one of them.

Coverage of the rollout was dominated by a close-knit cohort of Tesla influencers and Elon Musk superfans, many of whom are openly supportive of the CEO’s vision. Journalists and tech bloggers who might have been more critical of the technology were not only excluded but also actively ridiculed and mocked by Tesla fans and some of their followers for attempting to ask basic questions about the service. In Austin and online, Tesla fans were taking a cue from Musk, who has spent years fomenting a culture of resentment toward critical media.

This might be a bigger deal than the robotaxis.

Tesla said it completed its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery from factory to customer. A video posted on X shows the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y — leaving the company’s Austin Gigafactory, driving on the highway, passing through suburban sprawl and residential neighborhoods, before arriving at a customer’s apartment building.

Tesla’s robotaxi rollout has been rockier than the fanboys and influencers who got early access to the company’s driverless vehicles would like you to believe. And thanks to these diligent Redditors, we now have a list of all the mistakes the company’s “unsupervised” vehicles have made in the first couple days.

Some are relatively minor, like failing to recognize a reversing UPS truck while trying to pull into a parking space or driving over a curb. Others are more worrisome, like briefly driving on the wrong side of the road or dropping passengers off in the middle of a busy intersection.

This week, Tesla launched its long-promised robotaxi service in Austin, and almost immediately its vehicles were caught fucking up.

In a YouTube video, a Tesla robotaxi briefly drives on the wrong side of the road. Another video shared by Ed Niedermeyer, the author of a book about Tesla’s origins, shows a robotaxi braking hard in the middle of the road in response to stationary police vehicles that were not in its immediate driving path. And a third captures a robotaxi dropping off its passengers in the middle of a busy intersection.

After years of grand promises about how robotaxis would change the way we buy and use our cars, Tesla finally launched its taxi service. In one small portion of one city. With only a few cars and a few riders. Plus safety monitors in the passenger seat. Caution is a good thing in this industry, but what does all this say about where Tesla’s self-driving efforts really stand?

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Andy Hawkins tells us all about the early days of Tesla robotaxis. He talks us through the somewhat stealthy launch, how Tesla’s robotaxi plans could grow from here, and why nobody — not even Waymo, which appears to be way ahead — has this race won.

Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in.

But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised. The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service.

Tesla has begun sending out invitations for its highly anticipated robotaxi service, but there’s one significant caveat: it’s installing a “safety monitor” in the front passenger seat, as previously reported by Electrek. The invites, which were sent to Tesla influencers and investors, say the human monitor will “accompany you on your trip” when rides begin on June 22nd — a move that’s at odds with Elon Musk’s promise of fully unsupervised rides.

Details about Tesla’s robotaxi service have been slim in the weeks leading up to its launch, but Musk said in January that the company would launch its “unsupervised” robotaxi service with “no one in the car” this summer. Musk expanded on this in an April earnings call, saying the 10 to 20 Model Y vehicles would be remotely operated in the event of an emergency.

Last week, a Tesla Model Y with the word “ROBOTAXI” scratched into its side and no one in the driver seat made a turn off Austin’s bustling South Congress Avenue. Another Tesla, described by autonomous vehicle experts as a “chase vehicle,” followed closely behind.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the clip, seemingly confirming that the lead car was one of roughly 10 vehicles comprising the company’s robotaxi fleet, expected to make their official debut sometime next week. If that does occur, it will come nearly nine years after Musk first pitched the idea of a “Tesla Network” in which Tesla owners could add their vehicles to an autonomous ridehail fleet. And it will also be made possible, in no small part, by the state of Texas’ laissez-faire, AV-friendly regulatory environment.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) granted Tesla’s application for a ride-hail permit, a required first step in the automaker’s quest to launch a robotaxi service in the state.

Last year, Tesla applied to become a transportation charter-party carrier (TCP), which enables it to operate a fleet of vehicles for passenger services using employees as drivers. CPUC is a state agency that regulates human- and robot-driven vehicles for ride-hail services.

Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area for the past few months, Elon Musk said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday.

The company’s employees have been able to summon an autonomously operated Tesla vehicle for trips using the company’s prototype ridehailing app, Musk said. The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel, ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong.

Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant, in-person Cybercab reveal last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, served drinks to and played games with guests, and danced inside a gazebo. Seemingly most surprisingly, they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.

It’s obvious when you watch the videos from the event, of course. If Optimus really was a fully autonomous machine that could immediately react to verbal and visual cues while talking, one-on-one, to human beings in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have taken the stage at last night’s “We, Robot” event and put a lot of fears to rest.

He could have released comprehensive safety data for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature that showed real progress for the driver-assist feature, contradicting all the crowdsourced data that’s out there making FSD look truly awful.