The vast majority of Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin still have a safety driver

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in January that Austin Robotaxis were beginning to operate without safety monitors in the front seats, the stock jumped, signaling investor excitement about progress toward full autonomy.

At the time, observers estimated that just two of the roughly 45 Robotaxis in the fleet were without monitors, but Tesla said the ratio would increase quickly.

“We, obviously, are being very cautious about this because we want to have no injuries or serious accidents along the way,” Musk said of removing safety drivers from Austin Robotaxis on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call a few days later. “But you’ll see the amount of autonomy increase dramatically, I think, every month essentially.”

More than a month later, that increase hasn’t materialized. A report late last week from Jefferies analysts found that just two of the 15 Austin Robotaxi rides they took were without a safety driver. (Separately, they found that while Robotaxis were cheaper than Waymos and regular Ubers operating in the same area, their wait times and trip times were notably longer — consistent with previous reporting from ride-share comparison app Obi.)

Data from Robotaxi Tracker has identified eight unsupervised Tesla Robotaxis. But only one has been spotted in the past week; the rest were last seen roughly three weeks ago. In other words, the number of monitor-less Teslas currently on the road, compared to the time of the initial announcement, appears somewhere in the range of largely unchanged to possibly down.

Tesla said it plans to expand its Robotaxi fleet to a half dozen new markets in the first half of 2026. (It’s currently also in the Bay Area with drivers using supervised Full Self-Driving tech.) As we’ve noted, if Tesla’s Robotaxi expansion goes forward, it will probably look a lot more like a traditional driver-having Uber than an autonomous Waymo.