This time it wasn't Musk announcing it on X, nor an official Tesla press release. The number comes from a website where users track vehicles on their own: over the past two weeks, 170 Robotaxi trips were logged in Austin, all without a safety driver in the seat, involving 54 different vehicles. The Verge reported on this data, sourced from a crowd-sourced tracking site called Robotaxi Tracker, whose founder Ethan McKanna confirmed the numbers to the outlet.
The timing is worth noting. Musk had previously announced that Robotaxi began testing without safety drivers, and said the whole fleet would drop in-car safety drivers entirely by the end of 2025. Now it's August 2026, and this goal is only just being fulfilled — and notably, it wasn't Tesla saying so, but an outside tool measuring it. That's part of why this news carries some weight.
The shift McKanna observed isn't limited to Austin — Dallas and Houston are also seeing an uptick in unsupervised trips. The contrast with earlier this year makes it even more striking: just last week, the same tracking app showed only 28 unsupervised vehicles combined across all six markets, meaning this surge happened in a very short window.
That said, Tesla isn't exactly clean on this front. Earlier this year it was revealed that some seemingly "unsupervised" Robotaxi trips were actually being controlled by remote human operators. That means even without a safety driver on board, it doesn't necessarily mean the vehicle is truly fully self-driving.
This surge in unsupervised trips lines up right before Tesla's upcoming Cybercab reveal. The company has told employees it plans to kick off an initial Cybercab reveal in Austin this month, and has run a raffle giving some Robotaxi riders a chance to be invited to attend — though the exact date hasn't been made public. Cybercab is the self-driving vehicle Tesla built from scratch, with no pedals and no steering wheel inside, meaning it's designed from the ground up to rule out human driver intervention. If Austin's unsupervised testing isn't mature enough, the foundation for putting Cybercab on the road gets shaky too.
Put next to the rest of the self-driving industry, this number isn't actually that big. Waymo alone already operates over 300 driverless vehicles in Austin, with roughly 4,000 total running across other cities. Tesla's 54 here marks it catching up on its own previously slow progress, but there's still a clear gap from the scale of its competitors.
