There seems some confusion so I will clear things up:

No humans in the chain = no safety driver.

Also seems to be still waitlist based/not really commercially at this moment. More like pilot testing.

Correct me if I am wrong.

@RutgerDeMaeyer To be totally clear, you're calling the passenger seat safety monitor a safety driver?

@dreev Yes

Phew! A definitive verdict. Thanks!

For those wanting to agonize more, see "Will we conclude Tesla launched level 4 robotaxis in summer 2025?". I think the remaining confusion is:

1. How fair is it to count the passenger seat safety monitors as safety drivers? My litmus test is whether the safety monitor has their finger on a kill switch, which there's some decent evidence is the case.

2. My understanding is there's technically no waitlist but Tesla isn't serious about meeting demand yet, in terms of number of cars and the app being iOS-only, no Android. But in my market we decided to say the current offering in Austin does count as sufficiently public.

3. Is Tesla cheating by using tele-operators? I think we'll be able to rule that out when they scale up but at current scale it's a question mark.

It's been pretty brutal figuring out how to adjudicate all this stuff. I'm probably overcomplicating it. The passenger-seat thing was just such a confusing curveball and people had such strongly divergent intuitions about it. But the longer Tesla goes without removing them (most recently Musk promised them gone by the end of the year and missed that deadline), the more clear it becomes that they were there out of more than mere "abundance of caution", I think.

Given the waitlist remained throughout 2025, I think 2025 must resolve NO

ping @RutgerDeMaeyer

@DavidFWatson Has the waitlist remained? I thought it had been reported people were getting invites fairly soon after requesting.
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/3341/robotaxi-opens-up-to-the-public-tesla-removes-waitlist-for-ios-users

I agree that 2025 should eventually resolve NO but for the reason of 'humans in the chain' so none of the rides by end of 2025, or currently, count towards the 10000 rides needed.

@ChristopherRandles I wasn’t sure you’d agree on whether the passenger seat person counted as in the chain.

But my thinking was that “getting invites soon after asking” isn’t the same as “no waitlist”

@DavidFWatson My opinion doesn't matter. "Fully driverless and FSD" seems somewhat ambiguous re safety monitors in passenger seat. Seems like the software does all the driving and even when safety monitors intervene it is done in a manner similar to a change of destination and the driving decisions remain with the cars software rather than a driver taking over. Does that make it fully driverless? Alternately, is the need for a safety monitor mean it is not fully driverless as a human is still needed?

I thought "Human in the chain" seemed clearer that the presence of a safety monitor meant it did not qualify, but I suppose it depends on what you think is "the chain". If the chain is restricted to the driving then maybe there is no human in the chain but if the chain is the whole system then there is a human in the whole system.

I would suggest the phase being aimed at is more meant to be 'human in the loop' and the definition I first found suggested
The human "in the loop" might: 

• Provide data for training machine learning models.

• Validate or correct the outputs of an AI system.

• Handle complex "edge cases" or unforeseen scenarios that the AI is not programmed to manage.

  To me that seems to point towards the safety monitor being a 'human in the loop' and no rides should count yet. However what I think doesn't matter a great deal, it is what the creator thinks or intended.

@ChristopherRandles

😆 sorry, I didn’t check carefully and thought you were @RutgerDeMaeyer

@Bayesian Can’t seem to resolve one year I think.

@RutgerDeMaeyer sorry, you’re right. Linked mc options cannot be early resolved

@RutgerDeMaeyer Do you have a verdict on whether the robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas with passenger-seat safety monitors count as fully driverless? In case you're unsure I can recommend my own market that's still agonizing about the fairest way to answer that question.

@dreev I don't know what creator will think but is 'fully driverless' a condition or is the condition here 'commercially operational'. It is operating but not profitably as it has nowhere near the scale to cover costs of safety monitors, vehicle expenses and system development even if fsd driving development is excluded. So doesn't seem commercially operational yet to me, I would say that so far, it is only testing out the systems level of operation.

@ChristopherRandles commercial operation doesn't require profitability (though without it you'll stop operating sooner or later) but the scale definitely seems pretty small.

Does "without any humans in the chain" mean that rides with a safety monitor in the passenger seat do not count towards the 10k rides needed for this market? We've been agonizing about that in other Tesla robotaxi markets.

(There are also questions about tele-operation, and new confusion with Austin robotaxi rides having driver-seat backup drivers back in for rides that include highways. But maybe starting with a definitive verdict on the passenger-seat safety monitors is easier.)

@dreev also what's the status on "available to the general public" isn't it still invite only or is there a waitlist or what? I'd hope none of the Tesla rides so far count, and the price here reflects an expectation things will change in time? bwdik

edit: a quick search shows they're on a waitlist, so unambiguously zero rides so far qualify given "not behind a waitlist" in description.

btw the big creator position in 2025 makes me wary of pushing it too much. oh well.

@RutgerDeMaeyer Shall we resolve 2024 to NO?

@dreev it's dependent MC, or did devs finally implement this?

Just to confirm, this resolves YES if Tesla is competing head-on with Waymo and has served 10k autonomous rides by the end of the given year?

(Plus the other conditions listed -- basically SAE level 4 and no waitlist.)

Rereading the market description, I'm not seeing any ambiguity in this regard. Maybe there are confusing corner cases where this feels like a YES in spirit because private Teslas are driving around with no one in the driver's seat all the time, despite the robotaxi part not having happened. But I guess with robotaxi in the title and throughout the description, even that would probably have to be a NO? Or maybe if people are making money on Uber/Lyft by sending their Tesla out driverlessly, that should count, whether or not Tesla is running the robotaxi service.