After years of bold promises and missed deadlines, Tesla has finally launched a pilot fleet of autonomous taxis in the Texas capital. But the debut has already sparked safety concerns and renewed scepticism about the company’s readiness to deliver truly self-driving vehicles.
Eyebrows are already raising as this next phase in Tesla’s coming of age unfolds, and both fans and opponents keep a close watch. Videos circulating on social media show the cars allegedly ignoring red lights, speeding, and driving in the wrong direction.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) confirmed it had requested information from Tesla following these reports. The agency is also investigating Tesla’s autonomous software following several fatal crashes.
Last Sunday, around twenty Model Y vehicles, operating without human drivers, began picking up selected passengers in Austin as part of a limited trial of Tesla’s long-promised ‘robotaxi’ service.
The cars, equipped with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software (FSD), are restricted to a small area of the city and operate only between 6:00 a.m. and midnight. The fleet can also be temporarily halted if the weather prohibits secure operations.
It’s a first cautious dip in the water. To ensure a trustworthy experience for passengers, a Tesla employee remains seated in the front passenger seat, prepared to intervene if necessary.
‘The crowning achievement’
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, never one to understate his ambitions, declared the rollout the “crowning achievement of ten years of hard work” on his social media platform X.
He insisted the project was entirely developed in-house and sees it as central to Tesla’s financial future. The CEO believes robotaxis could add trillions to Tesla’s market value.
Furthermore, Musk claims the fleet will expand to 1,000 vehicles within months, with aspirations of scaling up to a million by the end of next year.
Support vehicles
Despite the launch, the vehicles still require an in-car human guard and are sometimes accompanied by support vehicles. The service, currently only accessible to invited influencers and enthusiasts, falls far short of Musk’s earlier projections.
In 2019, he claimed Tesla would have a million autonomous taxis on the road by 2020. That forecast joins a long list of overly optimistic timelines that have yet to materialize.
Meanwhile, rivals such as Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, have moved ahead with commercial services. Waymo operates a fleet of over 1,500 vehicles in cities including San Francisco and Phoenix, completing more than 250,000 driverless rides each week. Unlike Tesla, Waymo relies on a combination of cameras and LiDAR, a more costly but regarded as a more waterproof technology.
‘The decade of AI agents’
Some see Tesla’s robotaxi rollout as a much-needed decoy. The firm’s vehicle sales have been under pressure, with net profits plunging 71% in the first quarter of 2025. Shares in Tesla jumped 8% following the pilot’s launch, though they remain down 12% for the year.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI chief and one of the architects of its self-driving program, has urged caution, although not directly about the Robotaxi services in Austin, but instead relatively speaking, at a tech event last week.
He recalled a flawless Waymo ride from over a decade ago. At the time, he believed the technology was around the corner, only to note how little tangible progress has been made since. “Software is tricky,” he said. “This isn’t the year of AI agents. It’s the decade of AI agents.”
