Seven months after Elon Musk announced that Tesla's Robotaxis in Austin were operating without human safety monitors on board, the city’s service appears to have finally gone fully driverless. Over the past two weeks, all 170 monitored rides in Austin were unsupervised, according to the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker. This development comes as Tesla prepares to launch its purpose-built Cybercab in Austin. The shift highlights a significant step towards fully autonomous vehicle services.

The change appears real, according to the site's creator Ethan McKanna. 'Austin has seemingly stopped supervised rides for a couple weeks now,' he said. 'Plates previously marked as supervised have been confirmed to be offering unsupervised rides.' This is corroborated by some users in the Austin area who recently reported this on Reddit and X.

Even so, Tesla remains far behind its biggest robotaxi competitor, Waymo. Waymo operates more than 300 driverless vehicles in Austin alone, and has around 4,000 across 10 other cities. The shift comes as Tesla prepares to launch the Cybercab, its purpose-built robotaxi, in Austin as soon as this month.

On Tesla's most recent earnings call, Musk said the Robotaxi program would scale 'very, very rapidly,' but offered no new target for how many vehicles or cities Tesla would reach. A new JPMorgan note suggests that Tesla is intentionally holding back on adding Model Ys to the Robotaxi fleet because it expects to scale Cybercab in the near term.