Tesla tests driverless cars in Austin without humans on board

Nearly six months after launching a limited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas with safety drivers in the car, the company says it’s testing driverless vehicles in the city without humans on board.

“Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on his social network X over the weekend.

Shares of Tesla rose 3.5% to $475.11 at the close of trading on Monday. The stock is now up 18% for the year, and is about 1% off its record reached in December 2024.

For more than a decade, Musk has been promising Tesla investors and customers that the company’s electric vehicles will soon be upgradable to self-driving cars, capable of serving as unmanned robotaxis, or of completing a cross-country trip without any human intervention.

While that still hasn’t happened, the company unveiled a Robotaxi-branded ridehail app and service in Austin in June, and a separate car service in the San Francisco Bay Area soon after.

On Sunday, Tesla’s official account wrote in a pair of posts on X, “The fleet will wake up via over-the-air software update,” and “Slowly then all at once.”

“And so it begins!” wrote Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, in a post on X, in response to a video that had been posted by someone else of what appeared to be driverless vehicle in Austin.

Tesla hasn’t said when it will be able to operate a ride-hailing service without human safety supervisors or drivers on board. But it may have still have a long way to go.

Tesla reported that, as of mid-October, seven collisions had occurred in the vehicles in its Austin fleet. The cars include ADS, or automated driving systems, which are not yet widely available, and human safety supervisors in the passenger seat or behind the steering wheel.

The self-reported data Tesla filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicate that the collisions were not severe.

Philip Koopman, emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an autonomous systems safety researcher, said in an email that with such a small fleet, there should have been fewer than seven reportable accidents, “especially considering that there is a safety supervisor in each one whose job is to prevent crashes.”

Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin was comprised of 30 or fewer vehicles as of October. Musk has said the company intends to double that to 60 by the end of 2025.

Koopman noted that Tesla has chosen to hide the “narrative description” of all their crashes in the reports to NHTSA, so there’s no way for the public to know what transpired with each collision.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for further information.

In Texas, autonomous vehicle makers are currently permitted to test or use their cars on public roads as long as they comply with traffic laws under the state’s transportation code. The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles told CNBC in an email that it “does not have direct authority related to autonomous vehicle regulation and therefore cannot speak to current activities” regarding Tesla. 

Regulatory requirements in Texas will change in 2026 with the implementation of its Senate Bill 2807, which the Texas legislature passed earlier this year. As of May 28, 2026, autonomous vehicle operators in Texas will require an authorization from the DMV for commercial use of their self-driving vehicles on Texas roads. 

California’s DMV and Public Utilities Commissions confirmed that Tesla has not yet applied for permits needed to conduct driverless testing in the state without a human at the wheel, or to operate a commercial robotaxi service.

In the autonomous vehicles market, Tesla lags behind Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S., and Baidu-owned Apollo Go and WeRide in Asia. Those companies are all operating commercial ridehailing robotaxi services in major markets.

WATCH: We went to Texas for Tesla’s Robotaxi launch