Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed earlier on the X that the Robotaxi, a fully autonomous taxi that does not require an onboard safety monitor, has been officially launched in Austin, Texas, and has begun offering paid rides to the mass market.
This means that on the streets of Austin, it will now be possible to hail a fully autonomous Tesla taxi with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile, Elon Musk also revealed earlier at the Davos Forum that the "Cybercab," a steering wheel-less vehicle designed specifically for Robotaxi, will be available this April.Formal productionThey even announced an astonishing goal of 200 million vehicles per year.
Saying goodbye to safe driving, Austin is the first to "let go".
Looking back at Tesla's Robotaxi fully autonomous taxi deployment, the service was launched in Austin as early as June last year, but at that time, a human safety monitor still needed to be stationed in the driver's seat to take over at any time. After six months of testing and data accumulation, it has now finally entered the "fully unmanned supervision" stage.
Elon Musk posted, "Just started driving a Tesla Robotaxi without an in-vehicle safety monitor in Austin. Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI team!" He also took the opportunity to recruit talent, emphasizing that this work is an important path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
However, this is not a complete rollout all at once. Ashok Elluswamy, head of Tesla's Autopilot program, said that they will initially adopt a "hybrid operation" mode, with a small number of driverless vehicles and vehicles with monitoring personnel operating simultaneously. However, the proportion of driverless vehicles will be gradually increased over time.
Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.
Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI team!
If you're interested in solving real-world AI, which is likely to lead to AGI imo, join Tesla AI. Solving real-world AI for Optimus will be 100X harder than cars. https://t.co/OnP8gredWD
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2026
A driverless Tesla Robotaxi.
No one in the car. No safety driver.
Fully autonomous.
This is actually happening.
- DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) January 22, 2026
Even with the launch of paid services, there are still "protectors" behind the scenes.
According to passenger experience videos circulating on social media, Tesla's Robotaxi service has been opened to the general public and has begun charging for rides, which is significantly different from the initial free trial strategies of competitors such as Waymo.
However, even though there was no one supervising inside the car, sharp-eyed netizens still noticed that there seemed to be a "chase car" following behind the driverless car, indicating that Tesla is still taking multiple layers of risk control measures at this stage to ensure that emergencies can be dealt with in a timely manner.
Compared to the openness in Texas, Tesla's service in the San Francisco Bay Area of California is still subject to stricter regulations, and test vehicles are still equipped with a safety driver.
All smoke and mirrors since the beginning.
The Robotaxi program is a distraction from Tesla not delivering on the promise of unsupervised self-driving, which it sold to millions of consumer car buyers.
It's also meant to boost the $ TSLA stock price, as the illusion of… https://t.co/It707BGm54 pic.twitter.com/UO1kHCNZ7E
— Fred Lambert (@FredLambert) January 22, 2026
Analysis of viewpoints
Tesla has finally removed the safety driver from its Robotaxi service, a landmark achievement in its technological pronouncements. While Waymo and Cruise had already done this, Tesla's advantage lies in its commitment to a pure vision-based solution, rather than relying on high-definition maps and LiDAR. If it can prove the system is safe and stable in Austin, its expansion will be much faster than its map-dependent competitors.
However, it's advisable to take the claims about Cybercab going into production this April, with an expected annual output of 2 million vehicles, with a grain of salt, as they may be misled by the "Elon Time" narrative.
Generally, it takes automakers months or even years to ramp up production. For a completely new car design to reach 200 million units in its first year of production (almost the global sales of the Toyota Corolla), unless Elon Musk plans to cram all of these cars into his own warehouses, the market's ability to absorb them is a big question mark. Secondly, regulations are the biggest obstacle; currently, only a minority of states in the US allow vehicles without steering wheels on the road.
Therefore, Elon Musk's move is more like a message to Wall Street: Tesla is no longer just a company that sells electric cars, but an "AI robotics company." As long as the Robotaxi story continues, there's reason for the stock price to be supported.
