Tesla Misses Robotaxi Launch Date, Goes With Safety Drivers

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes in Austin, Texas, US, on Friday, June 20, 2025.. Photographer: Eli Hartman/Bloomberg

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Tesla’s much-anticipated June 22 “no one in the vehicle” “unsupervised” Robotaxi launch in Austin is not ready. Instead, Tesla is operating a limited service with Tesla employees on board the vehicle to maintain safety. Tesla will use an approach that was used in 2019 by Russian robotaxi company Yandex, putting the “safety driver” in the passenger’s seat rather than the driver’s seat. (Yandex’s robotaxi was divested from Russian and now is called AVRide.)

Having an employee who can intervene on board, commonly called a safety driver, is the approach that every robocar company has used for testing, including testing of passenger operations. Most companies spend many years (Waymo spent a decade) testing with safety drivers, and once they are ready to take passengers, there are typically some number of years testing in that mode, though the path to removing the safety driver depends primarily on evaluation of the safety case for the vehicle, and less on the presence of passengers.

In addition to Musk’s statements about the vehicle being unsupervised, with nobody inside, in general the removal of the safety driver is the biggest milestone in development of a true robotaxi, not an incremental step that can be ignored. As such, Tesla has yet to meet its goals. A safety driver based service can be built with a system that needs once/day intervention. A no-safety-driver system needs to be able to go over 500,000 miles, a human lifetime of driving, a very different bar.

Tesla has put on some other restrictions—rides will be limited to 6 a.m. to midnight (the opposite of Cruise’s first operations, which were only at night) and riders come from an invite-only list (as was also the case for Waymo, and Cruise and others in their early days). Rides will be limited to a restricted service area (often mistakenly called a “geofence”) which avoids downtown, and complex and difficult streets and intersections. Rides will be unavailable in inclement weather, which also can happen with other vehicles, though fairly rarely today. Tesla FSD is known to disable itself if rain obscures some of its cameras—only the front cameras have a rain wiper. The fleet will be small.

Waymo started testing with safety drivers in 2009, gave rides to passengers with safety drivers in 2017, and without safety drivers in 2020 in the Phoenix area. Cruise had a much shorter period with passengers and safety drivers. Motional has given rides for years but has never removed the safety driver. Most Chinese companies spent a few years doing it. Giving passengers rides requires good confidence in the safety of the system+safety driver combination, but taking the passengers does not alter how well the vehicle drives, except perhaps around pick-up and drop-off. (While a vehicle is more at liberty to make hard stops with no passengers on board, I am aware of no vehicle which takes advantage of this.) As such we have no information on whether Tesla will need their safety drivers for a month or a several years, or even forever with current hardware.

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Update due to reader comments: The removal of the safety driver, and the safety case to justify that, is the biggest milestone in a robotaxi’s development path. Musk repeatedly promised that milestone would be reached, with “nobody in the car” and an “unsupervised” system. Tesla did not deliver on that promise or that key milestone, and instead has demonstrated something far less ambitious; an improved FSD with taxi features in a limited area south of downtown Austin, something many companies have done, and years ago, though not with only cameras. Many also ask if the employee is a “driver.” Safety Driver is the general term for a responsible person in the car supervising the driving who has the power to intervene and correct errors, in this case with a stop button on the door handle, others on the screen, and access to the wheel. In 2021, I laid out milestones for robotaxi development. Musk promised #15, Tesla missed and offers only #9 today.

Passenger’s Seat Vs. Driver’s Seat

Almost all test robotaxi vehicles use a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla’s will be in the passenger seat, in a situation similar to that used by driving instructors for student human drivers. While unconfirmed by Tesla, the employee in the passenger seat can grab the wheel and steer. (My own driving teacher corrected my action by grabbing the wheel while I was young.) Because stock Teslas have fully computer-controlled brake and acceleration, they might equip the driver with electronic pedals. Update: Videos show screen buttons to command “stop in lane” and pull over, and that all the safety drivers keep their finger on the right door handle button, which has probably been repurposed as a stop button. Filmers were asked not to film the safety driver.

There is no value to putting the safety driver on the passenger’s side. It is no safer than being behind the wheel, and believed by most to be less safe because of the unusual geometry. It’s hard to come up with any reason other than just how it looks. Tesla can state the vehicles have “nobody in the driver’s seat” in order to attempt to impress the public. The driving school approach does work, so it’s not more dangerous than having student drivers, but in that case there’s an obvious reason for it that’s not optics.

That said, most robocar prototypes, including Tesla supervised FSD, are reasonably safe with capable safety drivers. A negligent and poorly managed safety driver in an Uber ATG test vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona when the safety driver completely ignored her job, but otherwise these systems have a good record. The combination of Tesla Autopilot and a supervising driver has a reasonable record. (The record is not nearly as good as some people think due to Tesla claims. Every quarter, Tesla publishes a deeply misleading report comparing the combination of Tesla Autopilot plus supervisor with the general population crash rate, but they report airbag deployments for the Teslas mostly on freeways and compare it without general crash numbers on all roads for general drivers. This makes it seem Autopilot is many times safer than regular drivers when it’s actually similar, a serious and deceitful misrepresentation.)

ForbesTesla Again Paints A Crash Data Story That Misleads Many ReadersBy Brad Templeton

As noted, Yandex, now AVRide, has used safety drivers in the passenger seat, and has done so in Austin—also speculated to be mostly for optics, though there are some legal jurisdictions where companies shave made this move because the law requires safety drivers and they hope to convey an aura of not needing them. This has also been the case in China. When Cruise did their first “driverless” demo ride in San Francisco, they had an employee in the passengers seat.

So Tesla has been ready to run with safety drivers for years, had they wished. What’s tested here isn’t the safety of the cars, but all the complexity of handling passengers, including the surprising problems of good PuDo (Pick-up/Drop-off). Whether Teslas can operate a safe robotaxi with nobody onboard, particularly with their much more limited sensor hardware, remains to be seen. The videos I have seen have done PuDo in parking lots some distance from where the riders were.

Other Paths To Launch

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Tesla apparently experimented with different paths to getting out on the road before they are ready to run unsupervised. In particular, vehicles were seen with the passenger seat safety driver, and also being followed by a “chase car” with two on board. Reports also came of Tesla planning for “lots of tele-ops” including not just remote assistance (as all services do) but remote supervision including remote driving. We may speculate that Tesla evaluated many different approaches, for example:

1. Releasing a full, actually unsupervised vehicle (ie. a real robotaxi)
2. Remote supervisor over data networks with just “emergency stop”
3. Safety driver behind the wheel (almost all other companies)
4. Safety driver in passenger seat (a few companies)
5. Remote supervisor in chase car (zero latency, direct eyes-on)
6. Remote supervisor over data networks with remote driving
7. Remote driving (Done by Vay and other companies to deliver cars.)
8. “Fake it 'till you make it” – limit operations severely so even though not ready, probability of serious crash is low enough

Because Elon Musk promised “nobody in the car” and “unsupervised” in the most recent Tesla earnings call, there was great pressure to produce #1, but the Tesla team must have concluded they could not do that yet, and made the right choice, though #3 is a better choice than #4. They also did not feel up to #2, which is commonly speculated to be what other companies have done on their first launch, later graduating to #1. Tesla does not respond to questions from media.

#5 just looks goofy, I think the optics would not work, and it’s also challenging. Remote driving is real and doable--in spite of the latency and connectivity issues of modern data networks--but perhap Tesla could not get it ready in time. All teams use remote assistance operators who do not drive the cars, but can give them advice when they get confused by a situation, and stop and ask for advice. Even Waymo recently added a minor remote driving ability for low-speed “get the car out off the road” sort of operations. I have recommended this for some time.

Tesla could have elected to delay. A small group of Texas lawmakers requested Tesla delay until new Texas regulations come into force. Some felt this offered Tesla an easy escape from their self-created deadline, blaming regulators. Musk no longer holds the same sway with federal regulators he had until recently.

It is worth noting the contrast beween Cruise’s “night only” launch and Tesla’s mostly-daytime one. Cruise selected the night because there is less traffic and complexity. LIDARs see very well at night. Tesla’s camera-based system has very different constraints at night and many fear it’s inferior then. On the other hand Tesla will operate in some night hours and with more cars and pedestrians on the street.

The question for Tesla will be whether the use of safety drivers is a very temporary thing, done just because they weren’t quite ready but needed to meet the announced date, or a multi-year program as it has been for most teams. Tesla is famous for not meeting the forecast ship dates for its FSD system, so it’s not shocking that this pattern continues. The bigger question is whether they can do it at all. Tesla FSD 13, the version available to Tesla owners, isn’t even remotely close to robotaxi ready. If Tesla has made a version which is closer, through extra work, training and severe limitations of the problem space, it’s still a big accomplishment. This will be seen in the coming months. Two robocar teams had severe interactions with pedestrians, resulting in the end of both teams. Tesla knows they must not make mistakes.