Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Robotaxis Are Days Away From Going Fully Unsupervised

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again doubled down on his promise that the company’s Robotaxi service in Austin will run without any human supervision — and he says it’s only weeks away.

Speaking during a live session at the recent xAI Hackathon, Musk declared that “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point.” He added that “there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks.”

This tight, three-week schedule cuts it close to the end of 2025, but it aligns with the CEO’s repeated claims made throughout the year. In September, he stated, “Should be no safety driver by end of year.” He reiterated this on the Q3 Earnings Call in October, saying, “We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year.”

Currently, the Austin Robotaxi operation employs “Safety Monitors” who sit in the passenger seat on city roads and in the driver’s seat for highway stretches. Removing them is seen as a crucial test of the FSD system’s maturity and its ability to handle complex urban driving scenarios without intervention.

Tesla Robotaxi interior view. Source: Tesla

Validation and the next generation of AI

The path to unsupervised operation is currently focused on final checks, according to Musk, who framed the upcoming deployment as a process of “validation.”

In the longer term, the CEO also gave a glimpse of a major planned upgrade to the FSD system. Sawyer Merritt reported via X that Musk “teased a new FSD model… coming in about 1-2 months.”

Musk further detailed this, saying the initial driverless launch would be with a “quite small model,” but that a much larger, more sophisticated version is on its way. “There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL [Reinforcement Learning],” he stated.

This next-generation model suggests a focus on improving the AI’s ability to “reason” and make more human-like decisions in unpredictable situations.

A gigafactory for chips?

During the hackathon discussion, he also noted that Tesla may eventually need to build its own chip fabrication plant to meet the demand for AI computing power.

“To get to serious scale Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab,” he explained.

Analyst confidence builds

The optimistic timeline from Musk is being echoed by some on Wall Street. Investment bank Piper Sandler believes the unsupervised FSD milestone is “very close.”

Analyst Alexander Potter cited data from the independent FSD Community Tracker, noting a significant jump in the metric “miles to critical disengagement” following the release of an earlier FSD version. He concluded, “Bottom line: Tesla is likely very close to removing safety operators from Austin robo-taxis,” while maintaining a positive rating on the stock.

The removal of the safety monitors will place Tesla on par with competitors like Waymo, which already operates truly driverless taxis in several US cities, and would represent a significant validation of Tesla’s strategy in the rapidly expanding robotaxi sector.

A deep dive into Waymo’s safety data, covering nearly 100 million driverless miles by mid-2025, presents a compelling case for autonomous vehicles as a public health breakthrough.