“Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car,” Elon Musk wrote on X last Thursday. That post embedded a second post from the Tesla enthusiast account @TSLA99T saying “I am in a robotaxi without safety monitor,” with a video showing the interior of a Tesla stopped at a red light. No one was in the driver’s seat, and the video was taken from the back seat. The video seemed to prove that what Elon Musk was saying was true: Tesla robotaxis are truly driverless now, like Waymo rides.
Tesla’s vice president of Software, Ashok Elluswamy, also posted on January 22 that Tesla was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors.”
Since that day, small fish Tesla fans have posted on X about hoping to find unsupervised Tesla robotaxis. And it’s possible unsupervised rides for paying customers are happening anonymously, but it looks more like the company is providing preview rides to extremely loyal Tesla influencers, and perhaps only with a human-driven Tesla right behind the robotaxi every step of the way.
For instance, since unsupervised rides were announced, Tesla influencer David Moss, notable for claiming (with some actual evidence) that he took a coast-to-coast trip in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, has been hard at work trying to find one.
42 Tesla Robotaxi Rides
42 L’s
1 goal of finding an unsupervised Model YIt’s tough to get a ride on the app & every ride I take one I see legitimately 4-5 cars mapping the area that could be on the app
This was also my 5th ride in a row with the supervisor in the drivers… pic.twitter.com/fxAvY4dWrx
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 28, 2026
According to an X post on Tuesday—five days after Musk’s announcement—Moss had taken 42 Tesla robotaxi rides, which is more than eight per day, and all of them had supervisors not just up front, but behind the wheel. Tesla moved these handlers from the passenger seat to the driver seat back in September.
It’s not clear if TSLA99T was claiming to have received an unsupervised Tesla robotaxi ride as a paying customer. On the same day as TSLA99T’s ride, Joe Tegtmeyer—a noted Tesla super-obsessive—also rode in one of these “unsupervised” Teslas, but revealed that it was actually supervised by a chase car. This would certainly be an unwieldy way to run an app-based robotaxi operation.
According to Electrek (who first reported on this story) Tesla stock climbed 4% on the news of unsupervised robotaxis. Some headlines have seemingly also taken the bait, giving the impression that truly driverless rides are available to the public.
But, as Gizmodo wrote the day after Musk’s announcement, it appears that the rare “chase car” version of a theoretically unsupervised robotaxi may be the only version of an unsupervised Tesla robotaxi currently on the road, but paying customers can’t even seem to access those anyway.
As of this writing on Wednesday night, Moss was claiming to have unsuccessfully taken 54 robotaxi rides in pursuit of one unsupervised one.
54 was not my magic number as I had to get one more ride in a Tesla Robotaxi before bed lol pic.twitter.com/rgEMIXRbig
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 29, 2026
On the Tesla earnings call that happened while Moss was still on his quest, Elon Musk mentioned unsupervised driving, saying testing is occurring in multiple cities, and that he and his company are “actually just being paranoid about safety.”
Gizmodo reached out to Tesla for information about whether or not any unsupervised rides have been given to paying customers, and whether or not any such rides involved a chase car. We will update if we hear back.
