With just a few weeks left in 2025, Elon Musk is once again reiterating the timeline for when Tesla Robotaxis will operate without any human supervision in Austin.
Speaking at the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk said the company is preparing to remove Safety Monitors from its autonomous ride-hailing fleet “in about three weeks,” clearing the way for vehicles to run without anyone in the passenger seat or the driver’s seat before the end of the year.
“[FSD] Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks,” Musk said during the live videoconference.
If Tesla is able to meet this timeline, it would squeeze in just before Musk’s long-standing promise that fully driverless operation would happen in Austin by the end of 2025.
Right now, Tesla keeps a trained Safety Monitor onboard every Robotaxi ride in Austin. On city streets, they sit in the front passenger seat, while on highways they sit behind the steering wheel due to the higher speeds involved. In the Bay Area, the program remains more conservative, requiring operators in the driver’s seat at all times, although that job gets so boring they sometimes fall asleep.
Removing those employees would be a major milestone — and a clear signal that Tesla believes its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software is ready to truly operate vehicles on its own. Musk also framed the progress as validation work rather than technology breakthroughs still to come.
