Tesla's Robotaxi fleet in Austin appears to have finally shifted to fully driverless operation, according to a report by The Verge, months after Elon Musk claimed the service had already dropped human safety monitors and promised the whole fleet would be unsupervised by the end of 2025. The claim is notably not coming from Tesla or Musk but from independent tracking, lending it more credibility, and the timing coincides with the imminent launch of Tesla's pedal-and-steering-wheel-free Cybercab.

Data from the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker app found that all 170 monitored Austin rides over the past fortnight, covering 54 vehicles, were unsupervised, a claim corroborated by social media sightings, with similar increases seen in Dallas and Houston. This marks a sharp turnaround from just a week earlier, when only 28 unsupervised vehicles were logged across six markets, though Tesla has previously been caught using remote human drivers for rides that appeared driverless. Even with this progress, Tesla remains far behind rival Waymo, which runs over 300 driverless vehicles in Austin alone and roughly 4,000 across other cities.