Elon Musk has provided an update on the company’s timeline for expanding its fully autonomous driving in the United States, saying vehicles operating without human safety monitors could become more widespread later this year.
Speaking during the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv on Monday, Musk said Tesla’s Unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology is already operating in Texas and that the company expects to broaden availability to additional U.S. markets before the end of 2026.
“We already have some vehicles operating with no people inside and no safety monitors in three cities in Texas and probably will be widespread in the U.S. by end of this year,” Musk said.
Tesla Robotaxi Expansion Plans
Tesla currently operates limited Robotaxi services in Austin, Dallas, and Houston without human operators. The company has also received regulatory approval to operate a ride-hailing service in Arizona, potentially setting the stage for another expansion market later this year.
However, Tesla’s rollout has not exactly gone as planned. When the company first launched its Robotaxi service in Austin last June, Musk said coverage would expand quickly and cover roughly half of the U.S. population before the end of 2025.
In the months that followed, the service failed to scale, remaining limited to a small part of Austin, and only removing the safety monitor more than six months after the service debuted.
In its shareholder materials, Tesla also outlined which markets it was targeting next for its unsupervised service. First outlined in late 2025, the company identified Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Miami as the next markets, all with targeted launch dates of the first half of 2026.
That plan was reiterated in the latest Q4 2025 shareholder deck, yet with just over a month to go until that deadline, the service has only expanded to Dallas and Houston, and only in small numbers.
Despite the slower than anticipated rollout, Musk remains confident that autonomous vehicles will eventually dominate transportation globally and the shift away from human drivers will accelerate rapidly over the next decade.
“Five years from now and certainly 10 years from now…probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car,” Musk said. “So overwhelmingly, it’ll be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car.”
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