A Tesla robot has been spotted on public roads without safety monitors

After years of broken promises and missed deadlines, several Tesla vehicles were spotted over the weekend driving autonomously without safety monitors on Austin’s public roads.

For several months, Tesla automated taxis In Austin and San Francisco It included safety monitoring devices with access to a kill switch in case of an emergency — a backup that Waymo doesn’t currently need for its commercial taxi service. The safety screen is located in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver’s seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waiting lists.

Musk said the human monitors are only there because Tesla is “paranoid about safety,” not because of some shortcoming in the company’s technology. He later prophesied The company will remove the safety screens by the end of 2025.

While Tesla is making clear progress in fulfilling Musk’s promises of unsupervised driving before the end of the year, the company has yet to put any paying customers in one of these vehicles, nor has it released one yet. No safety data Which compares its technology to human driving standards. There has been a wealth of anecdotal evidence, mostly from pro-Tesla influencers who have used the service, but this clearly falls short of comprehensive, verifiable data on vehicle performance.