-
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is currently testing its self-driving taxis in Austin.
-
An X user posted a video on Sunday that appeared to show a robot taxi driving around empty of people.
-
Musk had earlier said Tesla would remove the safety monitors by the end of the year.
On Sunday, an X user recorded a Tesla Model Y driving down the streets of Austin with seemingly no one inside, not even a security monitor.
Ever since Tesla unveiled its robotaxis in Austin in June, there have been people in the passenger seats of self-driving cars.
The video attracted a lot of attention from Tesla watchers online, some of whom immediately went into their app to order a robotaxi to see if it included safety monitors (which they did).
Tesla CEO Elon Musk later said on Sunday that the company was currently testing self-driving taxis without human safety operators, though that didn’t appear to be with actual paying customers yet.
“Testing in progress, no passengers in the car,” Musk wrote in response to user X who posted the original video.
Tesla itself responded to the video by saying “just saying.”
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of artificial intelligence, also responded. “That’s how it begins!” he wrote on X on Sunday.
There are 31 active vehicles in Austin, up from 29 in November, according to Robotaxi Tracker, run by Austin-based robotaxi watcher Ethan McKenna. Musk said on the “All-In” podcast in October that Tesla aims to increase Austin’s robotaxi fleet to 500 vehicles by the end of the year.
According to Teslarati, a news website focused on Musk’s operating companies, Musk said during a video call at the xAI “hackathon” event last week that Tesla will remove human safety monitors from its self-driving taxis by the end of this year.
“In about three weeks, there will be a Tesla robotaxi operating in Austin with no one behind the wheel and not even a human in the passenger seat,” Musk said, according to the outlet.
When Business Insider tested a robotaxi in Austin in July, the safety monitor in the passenger seat required multiple interventions, including once when the car went the wrong way on a one-way street.
Tesla did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Read the original article on Business Insider