Elon Musk has been very explicit in promising a robotaxi launch in Austin in June with unsupervised full self-driving (FSD). We'll give him some leeway on the timing and say this counts as a YES if it happens by the end of August.
As of April 2025, Tesla seems to be testing this with employees and with supervised FSD and doubling down on the public Austin launch.
PS: A big monkey wrench no one anticipated when we created this market is how to treat the passenger-seat safety monitors. See FAQ9 for how we're trying to handle that in a principled way. Tesla is very polarizing and I know it's "obvious" to one side that safety monitors = "supervised" and that it's equally obvious to the other side that the driver's seat being empty is what matters. I can't emphasize enough how not obvious any of this is. At least so far, speaking now in August 2025.
FAQ
1. Does it have to be a public launch?
Yes, but we won't quibble about waitlists. As long as even 10 non-handpicked members of the public have used the service by the end of August, that's a YES. Also if there's a waitlist, anyone has to be able to get on it and there has to be intent to scale up. In other words, Tesla robotaxis have to be actually becoming a thing, with summer 2025 as when it started.
If it's invite-only and Tesla is hand-picking people, that's not a public launch. If it's viral-style invites with exponential growth from the start, that's likely to be within the spirit of a public launch.
A potential litmus test is whether serious journalists and Tesla haters end up able to try the service.
UPDATE: We're deeming this to be satisfied.
2. What if there's a human backup driver in the driver's seat?
This importantly does not count. That's supervised FSD.
3. But what if the backup driver never actually intervenes?
Compare to Waymo, which goes millions of miles between [injury-causing] incidents. If there's a backup driver we're going to presume that it's because interventions are still needed, even if rarely.
4. What if it's only available for certain fixed routes?
That would resolve NO. It has to be available on unrestricted public roads [restrictions like no highways is ok] and you have to be able to choose an arbitrary destination. I.e., it has to count as a taxi service.
5. What if it's only available in a certain neighborhood?
This we'll allow. It just has to be a big enough neighborhood that it makes sense to use a taxi. Basically anything that isn't a drastic restriction of the environment.
6. What if they drop the robotaxi part but roll out unsupervised FSD to Tesla owners?
This is unlikely but if this were level 4+ autonomy where you could send your car by itself to pick up a friend, we'd call that a YES per the spirit of the question.
7. What about level 3 autonomy?
Level 3 means you don't have to actively supervise the driving (like you can read a book in the driver's seat) as long as you're available to immediately take over when the car beeps at you. This would be tantalizingly close and a very big deal but is ultimately a NO. My reason to be picky about this is that a big part of the spirit of the question is whether Tesla will catch up to Waymo, technologically if not in scale at first.
8. What about tele-operation?
The short answer is that that's not level 4 autonomy so that would resolve NO for this market. This is a common misconception about Waymo's phone-a-human feature. It's not remotely (ha) like a human with a VR headset steering and braking. If that ever happened it would count as a disengagement and have to be reported. See Waymo's blog post with examples and screencaps of the cars needing remote assistance.
To get technical about the boundary between a remote human giving guidance to the car vs remotely operating it, grep "remote assistance" in Waymo's advice letter filed with the California Public Utilities Commission last month. Excerpt:
The Waymo AV [autonomous vehicle] sometimes reaches out to Waymo Remote Assistance for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Remote Assistance team supports the Waymo AV with information and suggestions [...] Assistance is designed to be provided quickly - in a mater of seconds - to help get the Waymo AV on its way with minimal delay. For a majority of requests that the Waymo AV makes during everyday driving, the Waymo AV is able to proceed driving autonomously on its own. In very limited circumstances such as to facilitate movement of the AV out of a freeway lane onto an adjacent shoulder, if possible, our Event Response agents are able to remotely move the Waymo AV under strict parameters, including at a very low speed over a very short distance.
Tentatively, Tesla needs to meet the bar for autonomy that Waymo has set. But if there are edge cases where Tesla is close enough in spirit, we can debate that in the comments.
9. What about human safety monitors in the passenger seat?
Oh geez, it's like Elon Musk is trolling us to maximize the ambiguity of these market resolutions. Tentatively (we'll keep discussing in the comments) my verdict on this question depends on whether the human safety monitor has to be eyes-on-the-road the whole time with their finger on a kill switch or emergency brake. If so, I believe that's still level 2 autonomy. Or sub-4 in any case.
See also FAQ3 for why this matters even if a kill switch is never actually used. We need there not only to be no actual disengagements but no counterfactual disengagements. Like imagine that these robotaxis would totally mow down a kid who ran into the road. That would mean a safety monitor with an emergency brake is necessary, even if no kids happen to jump in front of any robotaxis before this market closes. Waymo, per the definition of level 4 autonomy, does not have that kind of supervised self-driving.
10. Will we ultimately trust Tesla if it reports it's genuinely level 4?
I want to avoid this since I don't think Tesla has exactly earned our trust on this. I believe the truth will come out if we wait long enough, so that's what I'll be inclined to do. If the truth seems impossible for us to ascertain, we can consider resolve-to-PROB.
11. Will we trust government certification that it's level 4?
Yes, I think this is the right standard. Elon Musk said on 2025-07-09 that Tesla was waiting on regulatory approval for robotaxis in California and expected to launch in the Bay Area "in a month or two". I'm not sure what such approval implies about autonomy level but I expect it to be evidence in favor. (And if it starts to look like Musk was bullshitting, that would be evidence against.)
12. What if it's still ambiguous on August 31?
Then we'll extend the market close. The deadline for Tesla to meet the criteria for a launch is August 31 regardless. We just may need more time to determine, in retrospect, whether it counted by then. I suspect that with enough hindsight the ambiguity will resolve. Note in particular FAQ1 which says that Tesla robotaxis have to be becoming a thing (what "a thing" is is TBD but something about ubiquity and availability) with summer 2025 as when it started. Basically, we may need to look back on summer 2025 and decide whether that was a controlled demo, done before they actually had level 4 autonomy, or whether they had it and just were scaling up slowing and cautiously at first.
13. If safety monitors are still present, say, a year later, is there any way for this to resolve YES?
No, that's well past the point of presuming that Tesla had not achieved level 4 autonomy in summer 2025.
14. What if they ditch the safety monitors after August 31st but tele-operation is still a question mark?
We'll also need transparency about tele-operation and disengagements. If that doesn't happen by June 22, 2026 (a year after the robotaxi launch) then that too is a presumed NO.
Ask more clarifying questions! I'll be super transparent about my thinking and will make sure the resolution is fair if I have a conflict of interest due to my position in this market.
[Ignore any auto-generated clarifications below this line. I'll add to the FAQ as needed. Text in brackets is my own voice.]
[Apparently I said in a comment on 2025-11-01 something about wanting to see a roughly exponential deployment graph in the year following the launch and that a flat graph would suffice for NO? Not that what I say off-hand in comments counts if I don't add it to the FAQ. But do grill me if I contradict myself at all!]
[On 2025-12-10 we talked about Elon Musk's November 6th, 2025 statement: "Now that we believe we have full self-driving / autonomy solved, or within a few months of having unsupervised autonomy solved... We're on the cusp of that" which sure sounds like admitting they weren't at level 4.]
[More discussion on 2026-01-31 of the possible passenger-seat emergency stop button and how it depends on how real-time it is.]
[On 2026-02-01 I apparently proposed that on June 22, 2026, we could resolve NO if we still didn't have transparency on all the ways Tesla could potentially be cheating. And that if Tesla started shooting past Waymo by then, that might start looking like a YES.]
[On 2026-02-02 I apparently defined supervision as a human in the loop in real time, watching and ready to intervene. And real-time disengagement means the human controlling the car in some way. The car getting stuck and asking for help is not a real-time disengagement.]
[Also on 2026-02-02 I apparently had some preliminary analysis suggesting robotaxis were subhumanly safe, but I later dug deeper and that didn't hold up.]
[We're taking human-level safety to be part of the requirements to count as level-4 autonomous.]
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@MarkosGiannopoulos Oh man, I can't bring myself to click "like" on that but I do like how valuable the comments here -- thanks especially to you -- are for keeping our ear to the ground on how things are developing and what Tesla's... I guess state of mind, we'll say, is. Keep it coming!
@dreev They've had their laugh then registered another 11 cars. Tesla now has 970 registrations against Waymo's 1207. https://www.fsddb.com/robotaxi?operator=waymo-llc
At their current rate, Tesla will have more registered cars in 1-2 weeks.
Some points that may militate towards NO for this market:
Quoting Tesla's robotaxi safety page, "This report excludes [...] miles driven with a safety monitor in the vehicle, in an effort to focus on autonomous driving alone." I.e., they're being explicit that the the 2025 robotaxis were not autonomous. You can say that that's just for marketing reasons, so their growth graphs look exponential. But that kind of cuts both ways for this market (see FAQ1). Also, it's probably not just marketing: Elon Musk said in November 2025 that they were "on the cusp" of unsupervised self-driving.
The passenger-seat safety monitors at least sometimes seemed to have intervened in real time to prevent minor incidents.
A bigger monkey wrench is that the safety monitors were, for some months at least, moving to the driver's seat for routes that included highways. We're pretty in the dark as to how many of the 2025 miles were fully supervised, i.e., sub-level-4.
Counterpoints:
They did launch in time and merely kept things small until ready to scale, like Waymo did back in the day. FAQ1 gives no hard thresholds for growth rate and in any case growth is exponential now and robotaxis have been in operation continuously since June 2025. Also Elon Musk maybe just meant consumer Teslas that were close but not ready for unsupervised? (I'm not sure.)
Intervening via the touchscreen to prevent low-speed incidents is closer to a "request immediate stop" button that leaves the car in control of the driving -- so not violating level 4 autonomy -- than it is to an emergency brake that could be deployed at driving speed.
A mix of supervised and unsupervised rides doesn't violate any conditions of this market as long as the unsupervised rides weren't ever halted altogether.
The ambiguity here is pretty excruciating. If this were about the "autonomous customer deliveries" then it would be easy. That was, in retrospect, a controlled demo and publicity stunt, even if they started doing those deliveries for real tomorrow. At the other extreme, if this were about whether robotaxis have been launched as of today, then, yeah, they're up to about a million miles a month and the cybercabs don't even have steering wheels. This market feels like it's at the precise midpoint between those extremes.
All I can hope for is that something goes drastically wrong or a scandal materializes that recasts everything in a different light. But that hope is dwindling and I'm probably going to have to just decide. Resolve-to-PROB at 50% is still a possibility, if that wouldn't make everyone hate me.
Reminder of my one request in arguing the case for YES or NO: avoid the word "clearly"! The only thing that's clear is how impossibly muddy this is.
@dreev on #3 on the NO side, this is without any meaning for the market, there is nothing in the market requiring autonomous driving on highways.
@MarkosGiannopoulos Agreed, it just means we can't be sure how many autonomous rides were actually happening back then. This is a big enough monkey wrench for https://teslapologetics.dreev.es that I'm considering switching to just the known autonomous miles...
@dreev Any reference to what Musk may have meant, as in counterpoint 1, should treat his statements as the most optimistic possible reading of reality for Tesla, potentially to the point of intentional overpromising, based on his history.
@dreev >"10. Will we ultimately trust Tesla if it reports it's genuinely level 4?
I want to avoid this ....
11. Will we trust government certification that it's level 4?
Yes, I think this is the right standard. Elon Musk said on 2025-07-09 that Tesla was waiting on regulatory approval for robotaxis in California and expected to launch in the Bay Area "in a month or two". I'm not sure what such approval implies about autonomy level but I expect it to be evidence in favor. (And if it starts to look like Musk was bullshitting, that would be evidence against.)"
It is quite clear Tesla is waiting on kinks in V15 to be ironed out before submitting it to serious government scrutiny. I don't think Musk was completely bullshitting but that regulatory approval that Tesla was waiting on back then wasn't what was needed for us to say Government is certifying it as level 4 it was just to allow supervised driving. Self certification for Texas and Florida is more like Tesla says than government certifies.
Yes I think it is quite possible that some version around v14.2.2+ is good enough to be level 4 but Tesla wants to ensure it does not get an adverse finding on good enough to be level 4 so is waiting for a later better version to ensure that doesn't happen.
The data, Tesla's decisions to keep monitors longer, and reports of erratic driving and official investigations into these erratic driving incidents all suggest the versions available before early 2026 weren't good enough. A no resolution on that basis seems justified to me.
@ChristopherRandles
a) "Tesla's decisions to keep monitors longer" - to what do we compare this? Waymo's public testing with safety drivers were much longer than Tesla's.
b) "reports of erratic driving" - Waymo has report of "erratic driving" as well, today, and we treat them as the gold standard of autonomous driving.
c) "official investigations" - There is a long history of NHTSA on different features around FSD that have amounted to nothing or resolved though simple software updates.
@dreev "we can't be sure how many autonomous rides were actually happening back then" - if a paying customer was in the car, the car drove itself the entire time, there was no need for an intervention, how's that not autonomous? I feel like we're in a religious debate, trying to not admit that there are hundreds of cars in in multiple cities driving themselves :)
@MarkosGiannopoulos >"Tesla's decisions to keep monitors longer" - to what do we compare this?"
I am comparing this to Tesla deciding the system was good enough to remove all monitors from some cars in Austin by 31 August 2025. They didn't they only did so by Jan 2026.
We can quibble about exactly when on any one of the four lines I listed i.e.
1. Safety data/estimates, 2 Tesla's decisions on when to remove monitors, 3 reports of erratic driving and 4 Official investigations into these erratic driving incidents.
But when all 4 lines appear to me to be saying not at standard required at 31 August 2025 but yes to reaching the standards required by around Jan/Feb 2026 then I am saying that the whole of the evidence is more robust than quibbling over any single line of evidence.
I am allowing much more latitude than looking at
"Will we trust government certification that it's level 4?
Yes, I think this is the right standard."
and insisting on no it hasn't happened until the government certifies it as level 4.
the car drove itself the entire time, there was no need for an intervention, how's that not autonomous?
Right, but that's the thing we don't know. If there was a safety driver and they intervened to prevent an accident, there would be no requirement to report that.
Also, recall the thought experiment where you're in a Yugo and wait for a straight, empty stretch of road. Take your hands off the wheel for a minute and count that as +1 autonomous mile. With few enough miles you can cheat that way. "Sure there was a safety monitor but they never intervened!" That doesn't count if it was only by luck that they never intervened, right?
That's why we have to know the mileage as part of the safety stats. And this market requires exceeding human safety. That's a very low bar for autonomous vehicles that would in fact swiftly get the whole thing shut down if not met. Fortunately it's clear they are meeting it in 2026. I think they were in 2025 as well but Tesla's making it surprisingly hard to make the case.
Waymo's public testing with safety drivers were much longer than Tesla's.
I don't think there are any double standards here. Waymo's miles with driver's seat safety monitors would only count for safety stats if you conservatively treat any intervention as a would-be crash.
Waymo has report of "erratic driving" as well, today, and we treat them as the gold standard of autonomous driving.
Agreed. We should ignore those reports for Tesla and Waymo alike and just look at the data.
@ChristopherRandles "it hasn't happened until the government certifies it as level 4." - which government is that? Per Texas law, Tesla is certified.
@MarkosGiannopoulos As I was saying Texas allows Tesla to self certify so it is more like 'Tesla says' than 'government says' and the FAQ clearly sees a difference between these. If you don't think there is or should be a difference between these then you might think Tesla would have applied for certification in California where, at least until recently, they have more vehicles operating?
Even if your "Per Texas law, Tesla is certified." was accepted without quibbling over who certified it, that didn't happen by August 2025 did it? Spring 2026? (Another event in early 2026 though this is more a accident of the timing of when Texas self certification rules came in rather than pointing to when the system was good enough.)
@ChristopherRandles We never expected government certification by August 2025, I don't think. That was just one way we identified for satisfying ourselves that Tesla wasn't cheating. I think we mostly have satisfied ourselves in that sense ... at least for the 2026 robotaxis.
@dreev Yes I agree "that was just one way" and Tesla has chosen to delay submitting it for scrutiny, so that there can be a considerable time when the system is good enough to be level 4 but not good enough for Tesla to risk going through a certification process.
That seems to be the situation we are in and I think this points to the relevant time for this question being a launch date after the system is 'good enough' to be called level 4. I am down to a 1 mana no holding again. I still maintain that a period something like Oct 2025 to Feb 2026 is a plausible period for when the system became good enough. It might be possible to stretch it forward to v15 availability but that seems to me to be harsh on yes holders.
Even if you stretch that plausible period back into August 2025 by assuming simple workaround fixes to issues seen in June & July were adequate and quickly implemented even though we have heard the proper fix for several issues came in something like v14.2.2 or v14.3, I don't see a potential launch date until Dec 2025 or more likely Jan 2026.
Now I have repeated this for what I think:
1. When is your plausible date range for when the system is good enough to be called level 4? and
2. What are your potential launch date events after the start of your plausible 'good enough' period?
A more nuanced view of the miles per city, as announced by Tesla. Chart by the Robotaxi Tracker
Austin and Dallas are on an exponential curve. Houston was ramping but then slowed down. The remaining 3 cities are very low.
New numbers and site from Tesla https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety
They claim over 3 million "autonomous" miles
@MarkosGiannopoulos As usual, I'm all ๐คจ about the ways Tesla is cheating with these graphs and numbers. The two ways I know of already: using a cumulative graph, and throwing away all the passenger-seat safety monitor miles.
This is all as confusing as ever to adjudicate but I do have the impression that they're finally ramping up for real. Just that we can't use the above graph as evidence of exponential growth. Or, if we do, it would mean a NO for this market since it shows literally zero miles until 2026.
@dreev Yes, this is a set of graphs prepared by a marketing department. Their priority is obviously not this market :D but having a clear signal of "the robotaxi is exploding". So they opt to not include the Jun-Dec2025 miles, to present a clear "no employee in the car" story.
I'll have Astra try to create a chart of combined miles from both periods :)
@dreev obvious why the marketing department chose the chart they did :) Although the October number looks crazy high now
(Yellow bars are from the Q3 deck https://assets-ir.tesla.com/tesla-contents/IR/TSLA-Q3-2026-Update.pdf )
