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

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi rides

2026-01-22T16:23:19-05:00

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.

Musk has said that the human monitors are only there bec …

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Is it even worth mentioning that Elon Musk blew past his own FSD deadlines again?

2026-01-09T11:13:43-05:00

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.

Tesla's "robotaxi" service, as it stands today in Austin and San Francisco, is still not available to anyone who wants to use it. It is still supervised by an employee who sits in either the driver or front passenger seat with access to a "kill switch" if anything goes wrong. (There have been some unsupervised tests, but it …

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Tesla is getting better about reporting FSD crash data — but the numbers are still misleading

2025-11-20T14:51:20-05:00

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.

But safety experts say the updated report is too little, too late.

"Yeah on the surface it looks like FSD …

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Musk wants to get rid of Tesla’s robotaxi babysitters ‘by the end of the year’

2025-10-22T18:59:25-04:00

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."

Tesla's robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco include safety monitors with access to a kill switch - a fallb …

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Tesla’s robotaxi push is confusing the hell out of regulators

2025-09-24T04:46:21-04:00

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 r …

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Elon Musk wants to bring Tesla’s robotaxis to SF — good luck

2025-07-10T14:59:51-04:00

A Tesla Inc. robotaxi in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22nd, 2025. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

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?)

The company scored a big win earlier this year when 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.

But the permit does not authorize Tesla to offer rides to the general public or operate a …

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‘We are the media now’: why Tesla’s robotaxis were dominated by Elon Musk superfans

2025-06-29T09:45:23-04:00

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 tak …

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Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer

2025-06-28T14:23:01-04:00

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 CEO Elon Musk had promised the first fully autonomous delivery would take place on June 28th. But on Friday, he announced that the milestone had been achieved a day early.

"There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any poi …

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Here’s a running list of all of Tesla’s robotaxi mishaps so far

2025-06-27T10:49:41-04:00

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22, 2025.

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.

Several incidents involve "phantom braking," in …

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Tesla’s robotaxis are operating in a regulatory vacuum

2025-06-24T14:40:51-04:00

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd, 2025. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

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.

Typically, when a driverless vehicle makes a mistake or is involved in a crash, the National Highway Traffi …

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