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.]
Update 2025-11-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator is [tentatively] proposing a new necessary condition for YES resolution: the graph of driver-out miles (miles without a safety driver in the driver's seat) should go roughly exponential in the year following the initial launch. If the graph is flat or going down (as it may have done in October 2025), that would be a sufficient condition for NO resolution.
Update 2025-12-10 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has indicated that 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") appears to be an admission that the cars weren't level 4 in August 2025. The creator is open to counterarguments but views this as evidence against YES resolution.
Update 2025-12-10 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator clarified that presence of safety monitors alone is not dispositive for determining if the service meets level 4 autonomy. What matters is whether the safety monitor is necessary for safety (e.g., having their finger on a kill switch).
Additionally, if Tesla doesn't remove safety monitors until deploying a markedly bigger AI model, that would be evidence the previous AI model was not level 4 autonomous.
Update 2026-01-31 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator clarified that passenger-seat emergency stop buttons should be evaluated based on their function:
If the button is a real-time "hit the brakes we're gonna crash!" intervention button, this would indicate supervision that could rule out level 4 autonomy
If the button is a "stop requested as soon as safely possible" button (where the car remains in control until safely stopped), this would not rule out level 4 autonomy
This distinction applies to both Waymo (the benchmark) and Tesla. The creator emphasized that mere presence of a safety monitor doesn't rule out level 4 - what matters is whether there is supervision with the ability to intervene in real time.
Update 2026-02-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has proposed a concrete scenario for June 22, 2026 (the one-year deadline from FAQ14) that would result in NO resolution:
(a) Longer zero-intervention streaks but not to the point that unsupervised FSD is safer than humans
(b) More unsupervised robotaxi rides but not at a scale where tele-operation becomes implausible
(c) Continued lack of transparency on disengagements
(d) Creative new milestones that seem like watersheds but turn out to be closer to controlled demos
Conversely, if Tesla demonstrates a clear step change in autonomy before June 22, 2026 (such as declaring victory, opening up about disengagements, and shooting past Waymo), there would still be a debate about whether Tesla was at level 4 on August 31, 2025, but it would be more reasonable to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt on questions about tele-operation and kill switches.
Update 2026-02-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has clarified terminology and concepts around supervision and disengagement:
Supervision refers to a human in the loop in real time, watching the road and able to intervene.
Real-time disengagement is when a human supervisor intervenes to control the car in some way - a gap in the car's autonomy. If the car stops on its own and asks for help or needs rescuing, those might count as other kinds of disengagement but not a real-time disengagement.
Evidence threshold: Human drivers have fatalities roughly once per 100 million miles, or non-fatal crashes every half million miles. A supervised self-driving car needs to go hundreds of thousands of miles between real-time disengagements before we have much evidence it's human-level safe.
With less than 100k robotaxi miles, seeing zero real-time disengagements would still be fairly weak evidence that the robotaxis would crash less than humans when unsupervised.
For miles with an empty driver's seat, we need to know:
If safety monitors had the ability to intervene with a passenger-side kill switch
If that kill switch was real-time (like an emergency brake) or just a request for the car to autonomously come to a stop as quickly as possible
If the robotaxis have been remotely supervised (using the definition of supervision from FAQ8)
Update 2026-02-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has analyzed data suggesting Tesla robotaxis may have markedly worse safety than human drivers, even with supervision. If this analysis is fair, the creator indicates that Tesla's safety record could be too far below human-level to count as level 4 autonomy, regardless of questions about kill switches or remote supervision.
The creator notes that human-level safety has been assumed as a lower bound for level 4 autonomy throughout this market. A safety record significantly worse than human drivers would not meet the level 4 standard, even if other technical criteria were satisfied.
The creator acknowledges a possible Tesla-optimist interpretation: that Musk "jumped the gun" in summer 2025 but may have achieved unsupervised FSD later (possibly January 2026). However, this would still result in NO resolution for this market, since the criteria must be met by August 31, 2025.
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RobotaxiTracker is showing the Austin robotaxi fleet shrinking at the moment.
Are we all agreed that if Tesla doesn't start scaling up until the upcoming AI5 chip is done that that would suffice for a definitive NO for this market?
@dreev
"High-volume production of Tesla's next-generation AI5 (or Hardware 5) chips is scheduled to begin in 2027. While design work is nearing completion, limited production of samples and a small number of units is expected to start in 2026."
Why would we have to wait that long? Surely v15 or at least v14.5 would be expected well before then?
or if not driving software versions then
>"The creator is [tentatively] proposing a new necessary condition for YES resolution: the graph of driver-out miles (miles without a safety driver in the driver's seat) should go roughly exponential in the year following the initial launch. If the graph is flat or going down (as it may have done in October 2025), that would be a sufficient condition for NO resolution."
How many or how long do these flat periods have to be before you say this is not exponential growth instead they are waiting for the software to reach the level required?
or simply looking at: 4.5 months after end of Aug before any unsupervised and near enough 6.5 months with only a maximum of 7 unsupervised vehicles.
Just when did this launch? Not June as they had to fix software issues and I don't recall anything in July or Aug. You could have level 4 software which through abundance of caution you place safety monitors within them. In this scenario the launch might be with safety monitors but then there would be more progressive roll-out and not official investigations of erratic driving that needed to be fixed. So I think you should rule out June and conclude there is no sensible date to be the launch date until at least Jan 2026 when unsupervised first started.
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/3337/tesla-delays-next-gen-ai5-to-mid-2027-cybercab-will-launch-on-ai4-hardware
@ChristopherRandles Yeah, I should've emphasized that that's not an "if and only if". The case for NO seems stronger than ever and I'm just hoping to identify something so definitive that even the most ardent YES defenders concede.
I guess right now there's still a needle-eye path to victory for YES:
We somehow learn or find reason to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt that they haven't used remote supervision or kill switches.
NHTSA crash data ends up showing the robotaxis to be no worse than human drivers.
The robotaxi service goes exponential.
We end up with reason to believe that the hardware and software are not significantly different from what was running in the robotaxis in Austin on August 31st.
If all that happened quickly enough then I guess it would at least feel stingy to say that the launch didn't happen last summer. Like, in that universe, it wouldn't feel too excessively generous to characterize it as a launch in summer 2025 that was just very slow and cautious.
I don't think that's our universe and I think that's becoming ever clearer. So I'm just anxious to identify lines in the sand beyond which we can call the NO official. But you're right that the AI5 chip is probably too far in the future to be helpful in that regard. We already agreed (I think? At least @MarkosGiannopoulos did -- correct me if I'm wrong) that we can resolve NO on June 22, 2026, if nothing changes by then.
So I guess I'm just saying that even if things explode (the good kind of explode) before that date, if they do so specifically because of a breakthrough in the hardware or software, that would be very exciting but would also leave us at NO for this market. We'd infer that Tesla wasn't at level 4 on August 31, 2025.
Again, I appreciate all the reasons that's already highly unlikely, I'm just hoping to avoid litigating it.
Tesla fan who extremely does not want this to be true is worried that the robotaxi program has stalled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK75LoEBURo
Relatedly, I added a list of non-updates to James's Tesla vs Waymo market:
https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/tesla-serves-more-fully-autonomous#i76c41294i
@dreev research on Robotaxi safety
https://x.com/raines1220/status/2023854888040411140
@MarkosGiannopoulos
Oct 2025 at 40k MPI and Feb 2026 at 417k and this is still below human level.
(and to make it that good looking, has removed "parking lot dents and stationary crashes")
Seems like evidence they are still improving it up towards human level?
@ChristopherRandles This was mostly shared because @dreev was trying to run the numbers on the Robotaxi incidents. However, I think it's immaterial to this market. There are already tons of human taxi drivers who are worse than the average driver :)
@MarkosGiannopoulos I'm seeing potential problems with that analysis: Are they excluding miles with a human in the driver's seat (all California rides, Austin rides that include highways, etc)? Are they overestimating the fleet size? (Robotaxitracker.com says 45 robotaxis currently.) I do like the idea of excluding parking lot bumps and incidents where the robotaxi was stationary. (I mean, it's possible for a robotaxi to, for example, run a red light and then come to a standstill in the middle of an intersection and get hit, which is to say that being stationary at the moment of impact isn't necessarily exculpating, but it's pretty good evidence.) I think this is all extremely fuzzy when trying to compare to human drivers because the reporting for human incidents is so different. But we can compare to Waymo and Zoox! That was my strategy in https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla and I may try
repeating it with the data filtered the way this person is doing.
@dreev From what I saw, they take the 650.000 miles chart that Tesla made public in their Q4/2025 investor note as being about Austin only. Probably because the chart says "Robotaxi miles" (Tesla does not use the term Robotaxi in California, see also the Robotaxi page https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi which makes no mention of California)
@MarkosGiannopoulos Oh! That changes things! So maybe it's only the highway trips (and other times, like for weather, when the safety monitor has gone back in the driver's seat) that are getting lumped in? Any ideas for estimating that fraction, if so?
This is brutal trying to suss out the truth. I'm scrutinizing the relevant page of Tesla's Q4 report and they seem to leave it completely ambiguous whether that 650k miles includes supervised rides. I'm working on repeating my analysis with just every possible benefit of the doubt for Tesla, despite that being extremely undeserved, just to get an upper bound on what Tesla bulls can reasonably choose to believe.
From the official Tesla Q4 report:
Testing of driverless robotaxis began in December 2025, suggesting that rides as of August 31 did not count as driverless. That's puzzling because they've been reporting incidents to NHTSA since June 2025 for which they officially report that the car had no driver/operator, remote or otherwise.
Tesla calls the California program a ride-hailing service, avoiding calling those cars robotaxis explicitly.
They show a cumulative plot of robotaxi miles, presumably because a more standard miles per month plot would look embarrassingly flat for recent months.
No indication of whether the highway rides and bad-weather rides in which the safety monitor moved back to the driver's seat are included in this mileage.
Note that robotaxitracker.com is explicitly calibrated to the 650k in the Q4 chart, so we're not really getting independent evidence there.
But robotaxi-safety-tracker.com estimates mileage based on fleet size (from robotaxitracker.com) so that's a somewhat independent check.
See https://dreeves.github.io/crashla/ for graphs and raw data.
@dreev "driverless robotaxis" = no safety person in the car. The robotaxis have been using an ADS (Automated Driving System) since day 1 (June), so everything needs to be reported to NHTSA
@MarkosGiannopoulos Hmm, I guessss. Weird to say "driverless" rather than "safety-monitor-less" or "fully unsupervised" or similar. But I guess this is just the same old question mark about how much human supervision these robotaxis have had.
@MarkosGiannopoulos The digging continues and I'm satisfied that you're correct. In the Q3 Tesla earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy said that Bay Area rideshare miles had exceeded a million by October 22, 2025. So, assuming they're not committing securities fraud, we can take this graph to be the mileage for just the Austin robotaxis:
There may still be a subset of those miles for which a human was in the driver's seat (highway rides and bad weather rides -- I wish we knew what fraction those are).
I've updated my AGI Friday posts accordingly:
https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla
https://agifriday.substack.com/p/crashla2
Definitely let me know if you spot more errors! And thanks so much for all the help getting to the truth on these questions.
@dreev Good catch. In general, the investors' decks and the call transcripts are a more accurate view of what Tesla is actually doing rather than whatever Musk posts on X :D
@dreev This is an interesting one. An unsupervised robotaxi enters a construction zone, and the customer calls support. The support does not seem to be doing any remote driving, though (since the car does not do the logical thing to back out of the situation). The communication from support was not clear at all about what/if anything, they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lHPYoiRadI
@MarkosGiannopoulos Holy cow! I'm actually at a loss to explain this. The only thing I can think of, and I realize how ridiculous I sound, is that remote assistance intentionally let the car muddle through as an experiment, or in order to make skeptics like me look stupid. Which I fear is working. Because "they must be cheating with remote supervision" suddenly seems a lot less likely.
But my confusion here is pretty profound. Waymos understand hand signals; Teslas obviously don't. Waymos are also far safer. See my most recent AGI Friday. But when Waymos end up in situations like that, which happens all the time, they do not muddle through, they get human help.
So taking what we see in that video at face value would mean Tesla is already way beyond Waymo? If so it should be a safe bet that Tesla overtakes Waymo in 2026, something I'm betting heavily against.
Another explanation is that Tesla robotaxis are doing so few miles that they can count on edge cases like this to be rare enough to just yolo it.
Or could it just be that tele-operators can't operate the car in reverse?
I'm definitely interested to hear your theories. Really good case study here. Thanks for sharing it!
@dreev
"Waymos understand hand signals; Teslas obviously don't."
I don't think this is what goes on in this case. Yes, the workers are waving the car forward, but there are two huge vehicles in front, moving in all directions. The most likely explanation is that FSD is conducting multiple risk assessments and proceeding cautiously.
Besides, there is already a lot of evidence that the customer version of FSD understands hand waves. Example https://x.com/tesla_archive/status/2022498514329309646
On Waymos stopping and asking for help more often than Robotaxi. I would guess it has to do with each company's risk profile. Tesla is in a testing period, and they need the edge cases. Waymo is less risk-averse in general, is not so much in the media spotlight and doesn't mind a few "Waymo car stuck at intersection" kind of headlines.
@MarkosGiannopoulos In this new example you've shared, I don't see any evidence that the car understands hand signals. The car does the only correct thing it could do, given a human in the lane.
For the example where the robotaxi muddles through the construction zone, going backward and forward, I agree it's plausible that it's ignoring the hand signals out of general caution. A human would've been more responsive to the hand signals, but that's weak evidence that the robotaxi doesn't understand them.
The main reason I made that claim was what happened before the video starts. As the passenger described it in the video, "we ignored the flagger guy who was saying DON'T GO THIS WAY and we went this way anyway." He characterizes it that way again at the end of the video. But I just noticed he kind of contradicts himself in the video description:
The flagger was present, but he wasn’t physically blocking the closed lane. He was way off to the right, blocking the straight path, not the road actually under construction, and gesturing in a way that wasn’t totally clear (even to me).
My suspicion is that what he says out loud in the video is genuine and that, being a huge Tesla apologist, he kinda convinced himself afterwards that the hand signals weren't clear.
Not understanding hand signals would be consistent with examples I've seen lately of Tesla FSD not understanding signs such as "no turn on red".
PS: But to be fair, it's possible I'm giving too much credit to Waymo. I don't actually know how often Waymos give up and call remote assistance when getting hand signals from flaggers.
@dreev
>So taking what we see in that video at face value would mean Tesla is already way beyond Waymo?
I think the more rational assumption, is that Waymo cares more about safety & compliance than Tesla. Waymo systems requesting help, we ought not presume to be a TECHNICAL DEFICIENCY with Waymo's system. Rather, Tesla's system & employees refusing help, is a SAFETY DEFICIENCY with Tesla.
@MarkosGiannopoulos I zoomed in as much as I could and I think the Waymo's turning radius might be tight enough that it didn't actually cross that yellow line. Regardless, kudos to the Tesla robotaxi for the quick reaction.
@dreev It was close. The Waymo car made a wide turn there for no apparent reason. I would have probably slowed down if I were driving the Tesla.
@MarkosGiannopoulos Yeah, slowing down seems correct as a human. But maybe that's mostly because the alternative -- changing lanes -- requires confirming that the lane is clear, which is slower. But as an AI you're already, in parallel, monitoring that lane. So plausibly the robotaxi did the optimal thing, is my point.
@MarkosGiannopoulos Nice, it's looking believable that the safety monitors are on track to being totally removed.
Do you have any ideas for estimating the number of Tesla robotaxi miles in Austin that have had a safety driver supervising in the driver's seat? We know that includes any rides which went on highways starting September 1st, and at least some rides when the weather was bad.