First autonomous delivery a day ahead of schedule. No safety monitor in the car.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1938682871105102254

Update 2025-02-09
Open to non Tesla employees: The service must be available to the general public, not just Tesla employees.

• Update 2025-06-24 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Regarding the “Open to non Tesla employees” criterion:

  • The creator confirms that a service available to a select group of non-employees (such as influencers) will qualify.

  • The phrase “available to the general public” was part of an AI summary and is not the official criterion.
    

I don't really get this change, I feel like it is contradicting what was previously stated in the description, and I don't think it is an improvement.
From what I understand, the idea is to know if Tesla offer an actual useful service, opening it only to influencers makes it more of an advertisement for Tesla (and for these influencers) than actual service.
Also I don't get how there could have real expansion intention with this restriction (it could be a first step, but it has to actually be open to the general public after it).

@dionisos I do think we're in a gray area currently. If nothing has changed by the end of 2025 I'd tend to agree that a taxi service is not exactly being offered. But it's unlikely that nothing will have changed by then.

@dreev What are the arguments to resolve it yes if it is only open to influencers (I mean, expect that it is now stated in the criteria, but what was the arguments for this change) ?
Was there a problem with waiting for it to open to the general public ?

@dionisos It seems anyone can sign up to go on the waiting list. If Tesla have selected like 100 people to get invites and they are all influencers then I can see an argument that although anyone can sign up, Tesla is being too selective and an ordinary person who has signed up early or later isn't likely to get an invite. You could try to solve this by selecting a number eg over 1000 invites needed but that 1000 number wasn't in the claim originally so adding it now seems like changing the claim and could add a problem as we might not know the number.

Honestly I don't see a problem here. If they only invite a couple hundred influencers then it is more like a celebrity transport service not a taxi service., This isn't what Tesla are aiming for, they will open it up to more people or they simply won't have enough people people using it to generate a realistic number of rides and revenue. Once influencers have streamed their first use, using it would be rare for most of them. Staying at a couple of hundred influencers until the end of year simply isn't going to happen.

@ChristopherRandles a couple of points a) people with low numbers (example: 2400 followers https://x.com/DevinOlsenn/status/1938109340717879515) are getting invites, I don't think they count as "influencers", and b) people with invites can bring a +1 on the ride, who can be anyone

This is not a typical "closed testing" situation.

@ChristopherRandles Two things: 1. There is no waiting list sign up. The link that has been posted claiming the be a waiting list is just a marketing solicitation. That's why you don't need to live in Austin to sign up.

2. I recommend you at least consider the goal of Tesla is not to truly launch a taxi service but rather to stifle criticism that progress in FSD has plateaued in hopes to buy their engineers more time to make needed progress. If that's the case, this will stay limited to those the most willing to release favorable videos.

I've said it before and I'm still convinced: this is Elizabeth Holmes selling a machine that she hasn't yet invented while assuming that by the time she actually needs to deliver the product, her engineers will have created it.

@WrongoPhD Oh man, you're even more cynical than me but I have no actual confidence you're wrong. Any ideas for better ways to operationalize the "is elon full of shit" question? It's frustrating when, no matter how events play out, both sides declare victory. I guess we Tesla detractors can at least admit that Tesla has delivered more than we expected at this point. I thought the most likely outcome was the launch date getting pushed at least into the fall.

@dreev I think my favorite market now is about fleet size. I wish it ended in 2025 but it's my expectation there will be no sincere attempt to scale, and I think Tesla will want to limit the number of YOLO L2 miles driven as tobotaxis.

Having in car safety monitors is worse than what I expected. I believed teloperators would be acting as the safety monitors but the miles driven would be kept to a minimum to lessen the risk of an accident. I do still think they'll move to that, albeit at a very small number.

Do you have any idea how many miles their robotaxi service has driven? Beyond the first day, I haven't seen number of miles driven which I expect to have been higher initially then after a few days/weeks. Miles driven would be another good metric, but I don't think it's possible to get that data.

@WrongoPhD Well, Tesla can now claim they have had a single ride of about 30 miles with no driver and no safety monitor (no passenger either, but it's a step to that direction :)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU16hXSSGKs&t=

World's First Autonomous Delivery of a Car | Tesla

This Tesla drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to its new owner's home ~30min away — crossing parking lots, highways & the city to reach it's new owner. The ...

@MarkosGiannopoulos to be accurate, Elon said there was no teleoperator intervention. He did not say there was no teleoperator monitoring, so we cannot say this ride didn't have a safety monitor.

@MarkosGiannopoulos no passenger but there is a paying customer ;)

@WrongoPhD Yeah, I meant in the car. We do not fully know how Wyamo does remote safety monitoring either.

@WrongoPhD To be accurate Elon wrote

There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous! To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.

But as they have video I think you are right that it is likely someone remotely watched it and may well have had ability to tell it to stop but "didn't need to take control" as opposed to being unable to do anything.

First time is likely to be watched closely and video made available etc. Question really is does it become routine with no need for anyone to watch? Even then, it is easier than robo-taxi service which this question is about because no passenger for liability issues or for taxi customer to do something stupid. Makes sense to do riderless delivery before diver-less taxi.

I dissected Musk's statement a bit here: https://agifriday.substack.com/p/turkla

I pretty much agree with everyone in this thread and am specifically accusing Musk of equivocating by conflating "no interventions" and "no supervision". Basically, Musk's "FULLY autonomous" (emphasis his) in that announcement is a lie.

I currently believe (thanks to @WrongoPhD for helping me see it this way) that Tesla aims to string us along with these controlled demos while they finish getting to actual level 4 autonomy. (It's like the trope of lies from Marketing that Engineering has to scramble to make be true.) If they pull that off then us Tesla detractors are going to look like we've been pretty high on copium. At this point I'm very prepared to end up looking like an idiot. But I'm hopeful that the cheating will come to light. (Hopefully not via a faux-autonomous Tesla killing someone, like what happened with Uber's self-driving program.)

Any ideas for a more direct Manifold market about this fake-it-till-they-make-it claim? [EDIT: Ah, I had missed the number of robotaxis deployed market linked earlier. That's a good one.]

PS to @MarkosGiannopoulos: We do know how Waymo does safety monitoring. The reporting requirements for this stuff in California are elaborate and Waymo's nice and transparent about all this. Short version is the cars autonomously come to a stop and call a human when confused. No real-time remote disengagements, actual or counterfactual.

@dreev I was mostly referring to the number of remote operators/monitors they have per car. Some suspect Tesla is now and will be for some time on any 1:1 rate (and thus this is not a "real robotaxi". Any information on that?

I think this video of the first recorded safety intervention really makes it clear that despite being in the passenger seat, these are safety drivers.

https://x.com/teslarati/status/1937654180547821903?s=46

@WrongoPhD (I originally answered here but want to keep all my musing collected in one place so I'm going to link to my answer here: https://manifold.markets/dreev/will-tesla-count-as-a-waymo-competi#zgj6sx5tqf )

Will Tesla launch level 4 robotaxis this summer?

60% chance. Elon Musk has been very explicit in promising a robotaxi launch in Austin in June with unsupervised full self-driving (FSD). We'll give him some leeway on the timing and say this counts as a YES if it happens by the end of August. So far Tesla seems to be testing this with employees and with supervised FSD and doubling down on the public Austin launch. FAQ 1. Does it have to be a public launch? Yes, but we won't quibble about waitlists. As long as even 10 [non-handpicked] members of the public have used the service by the end of August, that's a YES. Also if there's a waitlist, anyone has to be able to get on it and there has to be intent to scale up. In other words, Tesla robotaxis have to be actually becoming a thing, with summer 2025 as when it started. If it's invite-only and Tesla is hand-picking people, that's not a public launch. If it's viral-style invites with exponential growth from the start, that's likely to be within the spirit of a public launch. PS: I wrote the above before we learned that hand-picked invitees is indeed how this has launched so far. I meant "10 members of the public" to refer to the waitlist. I think this was clear enough at the time; not sure if it reads differently in retrospect. A potential litmus test is whether serious journalists and Tesla haters end up able to try the service. 2. What if there's a human backup driver in the driver's seat? This importantly does not count. That's supervised FSD. 3. But what if the backup driver never actually intervenes? Compare to Waymo, which goes millions of miles between [injury-causing] incidents. If there's a backup driver we're going to presume that it's because interventions are still needed, even if rarely. But see FAQ 7 for a gray area here. 4. What if it's only available for certain fixed routes? That would resolve NO. It has to be available on unrestricted public roads [restrictions like no highways is ok] and you have to be able to choose an arbitrary destination. I.e., it has to count as a taxi service. 5. What if it's only available in a certain neighborhood? This we'll allow. It just has to be a big enough neighborhood that it makes sense to use a taxi. Basically anything that isn't a drastic restriction of the environment. 6. What if they drop the robotaxi part but roll out unsupervised FSD to Tesla owners? This is unlikely but if this were level 4+ autonomy where you could send your car by itself to pick up a friend, we'd call that a YES per the spirit of the question. 7. What about level 3 autonomy? Level 3 means you don't have to actively supervise the driving (like you can read a book in the driver's seat) as long as you're available to immediately take over when the car beeps at you. We'll discuss in the comments how to handle this case but I'm leaning NO because another take on the spirit of the question is whether Tesla will catch up to Waymo, technologically if not in scale at first. 8. What about tele-operation? The short answer is that that's not level 4 autonomy so that would resolve NO for this market. This is a common misconception about Waymo's phone-a-human feature. It's not remotely (ha) like a human with a VR headset steering and braking. If that ever happened it would count as a disengagement and have to be reported. See Waymo's blog post with examples and screencaps of the cars needing remote assistance. To get technical about the boundary between a remote human giving guidance to the car vs remotely operating it, grep "remote assistance" in Waymo's advice letter filed with the California Public Utilities Commission last month. Excerpt: The Waymo AV [autonomous vehicle] sometimes reaches out to Waymo Remote Assistance for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Remote Assistance team supports the Waymo AV with information and suggestions [...] Assistance is designed to be provided quickly - in a mater of seconds - to help get the Waymo AV on its way with minimal delay. For a majority of requests that the Waymo AV makes during everyday driving, the Waymo AV is able to proceed driving autonomously on its own. In very limited circumstances such as to facilitate movement of the AV out of a freeway lane onto an adjacent shoulder, if possible, our Event Response agents are able to remotely move the Waymo AV under strict parameters, including at a very low speed over a very short distance. Tentatively, Tesla needs to meet the bar for autonomy that Waymo has set. But if there are edge cases where Tesla is close enough in spirit, we can debate that in the comments. 9. What about human safety monitors in the passenger seat? Oh geez, it's like Elon Musk is trolling us to maximize the ambiguity of these market resolutions. Tentatively (we'll keep discussing in the comments) my verdict on this question depends on whether the human safety monitor has to be eyes-on-the-road the whole time with their finger on a kill switch or emergency brake. If so, I believe that's still level 2 autonomy. See also FAQ3 for why this matters even if a kill switch is never actually used. We need not only no actual disengagements but no counterfactual disengagements. Like imagine that these robotaxis would totally mow down a kid who ran into the road. That would mean a safety monitor with an emergency brake is necessary, even if no kids happen to jump in front of any robotaxis before this market closes. Waymo, per the definition of level 4 autonomy, does not have that kind of supervised self-driving. Ask more clarifying questions! I'll be super transparent about my thinking and will make sure the resolution is fair if I have a conflict of interest due to my position in this market. [Ignore any auto-generated clarifications below this line. I'll add to the FAQ as needed.]

Given the current advancements in autonomous driving technology, it’s clear that we’re heading toward a new era in mobility. However, there are still several regulatory, technological, and safety challenges that need to be addressed for fully autonomous vehicles to become a reality for the general public

@AndrzejaLatkowska hi spammer!

"the removal of the safety driver is the biggest milestone in development of a true robotaxi, not an incremental step that can be ignored." https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/06/22/tesla-misses-robotaxi-launch-date-goes-with-safety-drivers/

This market must resolve NO in the case of on-board safety monitors.

What a joke that an "autonomous taxi" still requires human labour in the car.

@JackAllison Waymo had safety drivers (e.g. in the driver's seat, not the passenger's one) at the beginning as well. This is also what they are going to be doing in NY https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/18/waymo-cars-are-coming-to-new-york-with-a-driver-behind-the-wheel.html

Waymo cars are coming to New York, but with a driver behind the wheel

Waymo says it will push for a change in state law to allow autonomous vehicles to operate in New York City.

Additional invites going out https://x.com/gailalfaratx/status/1937206972744376605

@Toastbroti I think some will try it out a lot when first invited then drop down to little or no use shortly after. Steadily inviting more people doesn't necessarily increase rate of use. So perhaps not as interesting as an increase in the number of vehicles being used.

Still it is a lot better than going so badly that they don't invite more people until they figure out issues.

@ChristopherRandles Keep in mind, they have been testing with employees in California and Texas (e.g. people commuting to the factory) for a year now.

@Toastbroti Have you heard of there was another batch of invites yet?

@WrongoPhD Seems like it https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brandon-goh_robotaxi-tesla-activity-7344016991357198336-QIGf/