Elon Musk took to X earlier this week to announce that Tesla is now operating robotaxis in Austin, Texas, without safety monitors in the car. While we’re happy to call Musk out on a fib, it appears he was being quite literal about the whole situation. Tesla is indeed operating robotaxis in Austin without safety monitors inside those taxis, but that doesn’t mean they’re absent. Instead, they’re accompanying them from the confines of a separate chase car—or chase cars, as video from a robotaxi user demonstrates.
While Tesla’s launch of the supposedly unmonitored vehicles made big headlines this week, the presence of spotters was not widely reported. It came to our attention by way of Electrek, which reported on the story Thursday.
Recent updates to Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” suite have finally enabled users to see the sort of reliability Musk promised nearly a decade ago, as Alex Roy and his merry band of autonomy geeks demonstrated yesterday by pulling off a drive from Los Angeles to New York with zero interventions. FSD was far from flawless, and weather and human error conspired to stretch it hours longer than previous attempts, but the car completed the journey without human takeover nonetheless.
The secret sauce that enabled this transition was introduced in a recent build of FSD, which is now in revision 14.2.2.3 as of the time of publication. Now, when FSD encounters an error that would have previously resulted in an immediate hand-off to the driver, rather than shutting down entirely while awaiting manual input, the software will continuously attempt to recover on its own. It’s known as TOI (“Take Over Immediately”) Recovery, or as I’ve already taken to calling it, “Try, Try Again” mode.
The end result is fewer FSD disengagements, which is likely why Tesla’s confidence level has improved so much. Roy told us that he saw the feature trigger twice on his trip, both times resulting in successful recoveries by the software. In other words, without TOI Recovery, Musk’s promised Los Angeles to New York trip would still be a hypothetical—nine years after he promised it.
But even with TOI Recovery, there are still limits to what FSD can do without human intervention. As long as that remains true, we expect the safety monitors to remain in tow. Sounds expensive, but if anybody can afford it, it’s Tesla.
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