7:16 AM PST · December 15, 2025 Just about six months after Tesla started testing its fledgling Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, the company is now letting those cars drive around the city with no safety monitor onboard. The removal of the human safety monitors brings the company a critical step closer to its goal of launching a real commercial Robotaxi service, and it’s a step that’s been years in the making. CEO Elon Musk spent a nearly decade promising Tesla’s cars were just a software update away from being fully driverless. Now he is on the precipice of launching a service meant to compete with Waymo, the Alphabet-owned company that he said last week “never really had a chance against Tesla.” The removal of the safety monitors will most likely ramp up the scrutiny on Tesla’s ongoing testing in Austin, doubly so when the company starts offering rides in the empty cars. Tesla’s small test fleet has been involved in at least seven crashes since June; few details are known about the accidents since the company aggressively redacts its reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Video of a totally empty Tesla Model Y SUV started spreading on social media over the weekend, and on Sunday, Musk confirmed his company was testing “with no occupants.” Neither Musk nor Tesla has shared how quickly it plans to move to offer customer rides with no safety monitor. The company’s own X account provided a hint in a post Sunday evening: “Slowly, then all at once.” Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, wrote: “And so it begins!” Tesla started offering rides in Austin to hand-picked influencers and customers in June, with an employee in the passenger seat who could take over if the cars did anything unsafe. Those safety monitors moved to the driver’s seat in September. The company has since ditched the wait list, and gradually expanded its service area to cover a large portion of the greater Austin metropolitan area. But its fleet size never grew to more than about 25 to 30 cars by most fans’ counts. Musk has claimed Tesla will operate its own fleet of Robotaxis, and said in July he believed this fleet would cover “half of the population of the U.S.” by the end of this year. That outrageous target, like so many Musk has set over the years, has been revised down to him claiming in November that Tesla would roughly double its existing Austin fleet, or around 60 vehicles. Techcrunch event