Tracking Tesla's Progress on Autonomy and Robotics

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I think it’'ll be useful to have a thread tracking Tesla’s progress in these two important growth areas for the company.

Yesterday, we got news from AI insurance company Lemonade, announcing:

Lemonade Autonomous Car insurance, a first-of-its-kind product designed specifically for self-driving cars, starting with Tesla FSD.

The new offering cuts per-mile rates for FSD-engaged driving by approximately 50%, reflecting what the data shows to be significantly reduced risk during autonomous operation. Lemonade expects further reductions as Tesla releases FSD software updates, which are anticipated to make the cars even safer over time.

They’re putting their money where their mouth is, based on data.

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Today, riders have posted of their fully autonomous, driverless and on-board safety monitorless, paid-for rides in Austin:

And Elon confirms:

That’s less than 7 months from trials with safety monitors. Took Waymo almost 2 years to reach that milestone.

And confirms my expectation that driverless rides would start with the Model Y, not CyberCab.

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That’s less than 7 months from trials with safety monitors. Took Waymo almost 2 years to reach that milestone.

Tesla has a chase car following each of these ‘safety-monitorless’ robotaxis. I suspect that all Tesla has done is move the safety monitor from the robotaxi to the chase car and given them a remote kill switch.

That’s hardly some great feat, but I’m not surprised that Musk would be deceptive this way and that bulls would buy it leading to the stock to pop today.

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And it’s only a few cars within the fleet:

Not all of Tesla’s fleet in Austin will be fully driverless. Per Tesla’s AI lead Ashok Elluswamy, the company will be “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.”

Tesla is charging for the rides, according to one rider who posted on X. There also appears to be a chase car following the driverless vehicles.

Tesla launches robotaxi rides in Austin with no human safety driver | TechCrunch

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Not unlike Waymo in its early driverless days.

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Are you claiming this is fully autonomous?

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I’m unable to find anything supporting this claim. So far what I have found is that Waymo did not have “follow cars”, although they did have remote monitoring (as they do now). The pieces I read do not indicate whether the remote monitoring was 100%, as the Tesla follow-cars are.

Do you have any information on that?

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This 5 year old video shows a chase car catching up to a Waymo:

There are also internet reports of a red stop button in chase vehicles, particularly in Arizona. Waymo claims its chase cars were there to have human support personel quickly available.

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They’ve scaled from one car per ride to two!

It’s a hyper-exponential doubling!

Didn’t they achieve the follow-car milestone in December?

The driverless delivery from June 2025 isn’t being repeated.

The “no safety monitor in the car” (never mind the chase cars behind the curtain) in December 2025 and today is the same.

This is why Tesla lacks credibility.

Earnings next week, coincidence?

When Tesla can provably demonstrate real L4 autonomy and start accumulating the millions of miles to statistically demonstrate human-level safety, then I’m happy to adjust my view.

Let’s see the real data.

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Hot and fast reported progress these past couple of days:

Alex Roy previously wrote a story claiming his Roomba was better than his Tesla in 5 ways.

Now it’s:

“CRAZIEST events in snow – but FSD did it! Holy s**t,” Roy said in one update. “Snow performance and recovery is unreal,” he later added.

“The video will be crazy,” Roy assured us.

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These videos of “not true autonomy” just further reinforce that L4 autonomy is not imminent for Tesla.

It’s evidence of non-autonomy.

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There’s nothing wrong with using a chase car. What’s deceiving is making a post on Twitter saying the safety monitors have been removed when really all Tesla did was move the safety monitor into a close-following chase car with a kill switch.

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What’s actually deceiving is you trying to put words in Musk’s mouth that he didn’t say.

What he actually DID say, and I quote:

Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.

Which is 100% factually correct, despite your spin attempt.

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We’ll have to check back in 2027.

This chase car video supports the view that the most likely outcome is little if any true autonomy for Tesla in 2026, certainly a very tough road to get mileage to even just a convincing start to statistically demonstrate autonomy in any meaningful operational domain with human safety levels this year (maybe they can go back and forth down main street?).

Even a modest 2 million miles seems a reach in 2026 (which Waymo can do in about a week).

Tesla doesn’t provide much data on their capability and safety, but ironically, by releasing these orchestrated hype videos they are confirming that true L4 autonomy is not coming soon.

Tesla has a march of 9s safety problem to work on.

Tesla pauses operation of "unsupervised" robotaxis