Tesla said today that its Robotaxis have driven a total of 1 million miles without a human driver supervising them. The number is more than double what we heard at the last check-in just six weeks ago, as Tesla finally shifts away from human “safety drivers.”
Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin last June, and it got off to an interesting start. The system made several goofs, only had a few cars available, and cars were monitored by a “safety driver” sitting in the front seat with access to some vehicle controls if anything looked like it was going wrong.
Since then, the system has improved and added more cities, and Tesla has mostly removed drivers (it first put them in a chase car, now it just allows occasional remote control of the vehicles).
Now, there are actually Robotaxis driving around in “unsupervised” mode – that is, the car and its on-board software is doing all the sensing and control the vehicle needs, instead of being driven by a human anywhere in the chain of command.
The last time we heard from Tesla, during its Q2 earnings call on July 22, Tesla had done 380,000 total miles of unsupervised driving with what it said were “zero notable incidents” (at least 17 of which were, uh, noted in government documents, as of May). This sounds like a big number of miles, but that’s not even the number of miles one average American will drive in their lifetime, so it’s not exactly a huge sample size.
But that sample is getting larger, and indeed getting larger somewhat quickly.
Despite Tesla taking more than a year worth of Robotaxi operation to get to 380,000 unsupervised miles, it has now put up another 620,000 miles in just the last 6 weeks, according to Tesla VP of Autopilot/AI Ashok Elluswamy.
Elluswamy made the announcement at Tesla’s Cybercab event earlier today, stating “I’m happy to announce that we have achieved 1 million miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation.”
Note the use of the word “unsupervised” here. This is not the weasel word that Tesla uses to refer to, for example, its human-driven ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, which it claims to be a Robotaxi but is really just Tesla employees driving Model Ys with FSD turned on some of the time. Tesla uses the word “unsupervised” to refer to truly autonomous miles, without a human involved.
The sudden addition of 620,000 unsupervised miles in just a few weeks may make it seem that the Tesla Robotaxi network is accelerating rapidly, but let’s not get too hasty. Prior to a few months ago, all of Tesla’s Robotaxi miles were supervised by a human, it was only at the beginning of this year that Tesla started doing any unsupervised miles at all. Now, basically all of its (non-Bay-Area) miles are done unsupervised.
And Tesla claimed that Robotaxi miles were growing rapidly, but last we checked in during the Q2 earnings call, paid ridership was flat, not growing, at around 900k added miles in each of the last two quarters. As of that update, Tesla had put up around two and a half million paid miles, 380,000 of which were unsupervised.
With this new update showing at least 620,000 more miles added in the last 6 weeks – nevermind the other half of the quarter not accounted for in that number, and any additional paid but not unsupervised miles from the human Bay Area service – it looks like Tesla will probably increase its total paid Robotaxi miles this quarter again. So the service should be back to growth, instead of stalling as it had last quarter.
Part of that future growth could come from the new deployment of Cybercabs at tonight’s event. However, reports have suggested that only 45 Cybercabs have been registered for deployment in Austin, which is about 1/10th of the number of Model Y Robotaxis already registered in the city (only a small fraction of which is in operation at any given time).
Tesla’s service may be back to growing, but it’s still far behind its main US competitor, Waymo. Waymo announced last week that it has done 200 million miles, dwarfing Tesla’s million-mile number. Waymo got an earlier start of course, first crossing the million-mile threshold in 2023, and is currently racking up more and more as it offers service in a total of 14 cities currently, with several more slated to come.
And of course, while Tesla is growing its service, it’s still not letting its customers use the software they bought, and instead today started courting business clients for potential moneymaking opportunities. Of course, those moneymaking opportunities rely on autonomous technology being rock-solid and usable outside of small geofenced areas – a goal that remains elusive.
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