Tesla Is Launching Robotaxis in Austin. Safety Advocates Are Concerned

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Elon Musk's ugly public spat with former bestie Donald Trump is sure to cause more headaches for the Silicon Valley mogul down the line. Not only has he sacrificed any influence he might have with the White House by blasting the president for his association with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but some in the administration have floated the idea of reviving regulatory investigations into Musk's corporate empire.
The timing of such a threat could hardly be worse. That's because Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle manufacturer, is about to face a make-or-break test of self-driving technology that the CEO believes is key to its future value — yet has been the subject of a years-long probe by the Justice Department into potential securities and wire fraud. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is meanwhile conducting multiple investigations into the possible risks posed by the same tech.
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Last fall, at a carefully staged event on the Warner Bros. Discovery studio lot in Burbank, California, Musk unveiled what he called a 'Cybercab,' a sleek, two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel. This was the long-awaited prototype of Tesla's robotaxi, or a fully autonomous, driverless passenger vehicle. Back in 2019, Musk had predicted that existing Tesla models would become capable of driving themselves without human oversight once their 'Full Self-Driving' (FSD) driver-assistance software had been adequately updated. Now he was demoing a different, built-to-purpose model, seeming to signal that Teslas already on the road would not be upgraded to robotaxi capability.
Then, in a January earnings call, Musk offered one of his typically optimistic predictions about a timetable for a paid robotaxi service, similar Amazon's Zoox, or Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet. 'Teslas will be in the wild, with no one in them, in June, in Austin,' Musk said, referring to the Texas city that has been a base of operations for his businesses in recent years. Investors were skeptical. After all, Musk has a history of overpromising, and the Cybercab unveiled barely three months earlier was essentially a glorified movie prop.
By late May, however, Musk was declaring significant progress on a robotaxi launch. 'For the past several days, Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in driver's seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents,' he posted on X on May 28. 'A month ahead of schedule. Next month, first self-delivery from factory to customer.' It would appear, in this case, that Tesla had defaulted to the original idea of modifying its commercially available models to make them autonomous rather than holding off until it had a fleet of Cybercabs.
Aside from stray comments like these, little is known about what Tesla's initial robotaxi program will look like. The company is reportedly targeting a launch date of June 12, with just 10-20 vehicles to start. A Morgan Stanley analyst — not Tesla itself — has claimed that rides will be available by invite only, not to the general public, and that the cars will be remotely supervised by operators prepared to take manual control if needed. That the automaker is keeping most details under wraps has left plenty of room for questions, doubts, and concerns — particularly as Waymo and other competitors tend to collect data and conduct local testing for far longer periods before welcoming passengers aboard.
Dan O'Dowd, a software entrepreneur and founder of the tech safety group the Dawn Project, which has routinely showcased the shortcomings of Tesla's FSD tech, predicts that the robotaxi rollout will amount to lackluster stunt. 'Musk's upcoming robotaxi launch will still be nothing more than a bigger version of the 1950s Disneyland ride that Tesla demonstrated at [the Cybercab] event last year, if it even takes place at all,' he says. 'Despite Elon Musk claiming that Tesla was less than a year away from solving autonomy for nearly a decade and decrying the real robotaxi companies for geo-fencing and remote supervision, Tesla plans for its so-called robotaxis to only be able to drive around certain parts of Austin, avoiding intersections that are difficult,' while being remotely supervised,' O'Dowd notes. (Musk admitted in a recent interview that the robotaxis would be 'geo-fenced,' or restricted from certain parts of the city.)
'Tesla has also shown itself incapable of developing a working Cybercab, instead leaning on its Model Y in another backtrack on Elon's many false promises about solving autonomy,' O'Dowd adds. 'The golden Model 3 mules that Tesla is using to develop the Cybercab's software clearly demonstrate that Tesla has put the cart before the horse with the Cybercab.' On June 2, an X user posted a video of a Model 3 in a Tesla lot in San Diego that had seemingly been modified to resemble the Cybercab design, with its side mirrors removed and the rear windshield painted gold along with the body panels. The clip was taken by many Tesla observers as evidence that it was also using Model 3s to run autonomous driving experiments ahead of the robotaxi pilot program.
Brett Schreiber, a partner at the San Diego law firm Singleton Schreiber who is currently pursuing multiple injury and wrongful death suits against Tesla over accidents involving its driver-assistance features, agrees that the company is backing down from the Cybercab concept Musk presented last year. 'It is a retreat on the idea that they are going to build out a new vehicle that is capable of autonomy,' he says, though 'a repeat of the continued lies and misrepresentations' from the CEO — namely, that existing Teslas can be turned into robotaxis. 'There is nothing about the vehicle today, whether you slap some lipstick on the pig of a Model Y, or any other vehicle in their production fleet, that [makes it] capable of level four or level five autonomy without driver intervention. They simply haven't gotten there, and just because they keep saying so doesn't make it true.' Levels four and five of driving automation refer to systems in which 'a human driver is not needed,' per NHTSA guidelines. Tesla's FSD is currently classified as level two, meaning that a human driver 'is fully responsible' for operating the vehicle even while assistance features are engaged.
Schreiber believes that Tesla brought the robotaxi project to Texas for 'a more lax environment with respect to enforcement,' saying that 'in many states, California being one of them, they would not be allowed to do this in the way that they are doing it. They fled California for a lot of reasons, the least of which was the fact that they felt more constrained by their ability to roll out and continue to use the public roadways as their own personal test track, and use the members of the public as the guinea pigs in the grand experiment.' Indeed, the Texas Department of Transportation does not require any special permits for operating autonomous vehicles — only that these meet the same safety and insurance requirements as other vehicles. In California, by contrast, the Department of Motor Vehicles 'issues permits to manufacturers that test and deploy autonomous vehicles on California public roads.'
Tesla, which does not have a press department, did not reply to a request for comment on details of the robotaxi launch or why Austin was chosen as the site.
As for regulatory enforcement by NHTSA, it would largely come after the fact, since autonomous vehicle permitting is a state matter, not a federal one. 'Under U.S. law, NHTSA does not pre-approve new technologies or vehicle systems — rather, manufacturers certify that each vehicle meets NHTSA's rigorous safety standards, and the agency investigates incidents involving potential safety defects,' a sposkesperson for the agency tells Rolling Stone. 'Following an assessment of those reports and other relevant information, NHTSA will take any necessary actions to protect road safety.'
NHTSA, as it happens, was one of a handful of regulators scrutinizing Musk's businesses to face cuts imposed by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with at least four percent of staff dismissed. In Schreiber's estimation, the agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) 'has been completely gutted,' hampering its ability to go after Tesla.
Even so, the ODI did send a letter to Tesla's director of field quality in May, requesting extensive information about the proposed automated driving system for its robotaxis in order 'to understand Tesla's technologies and operational use cases further, including to assess the ability of Tesla's system to react appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions.' NHTSA's probe into Tesla's FSD involves several accidents in which the system faced conditions such as fog or sun glare, including a 2023 collision in Arizona in which a Model Y struck and killed a pedestrian while driving into direct sunlight.
That investigation 'remains open,' the agency spokesperson says. Meanwhile, if Tesla doesn't answer NHTSA's questions about how its robotaxis work and what steps it is taking to ensure their safe operation by a deadline of June 19, or secure a filing extension, it could be subject to civil penalties.
By that time, of course, people may already be hailing driverless Teslas in Texas, with passengers, other motorists, and bystanders all at the mercy of a supposed breakthrough in vehicle autonomy. That's what has safety advocates like O'Dowd so alarmed. 'The people of Austin did not sign up to be crash-test dummies for Musk's reckless deployment of Tesla's defective and dangerous Full Self-Driving software,' he says. If the thought has ever bothered Musk, he hasn't said so. Upon stepping down from DOGE, he wrote on X that he would return to a '24/7' focus on his companies, Tesla in particular, as 'we have critical technologies rolling out.'
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