“Tesla Robotaxi just started driving in Austin without car safety monitors,” Written by Elon Musk at X on Thursday. That post embeds a second post from Tesla enthusiast account @TSLA99T saying “I’m in a robotaxi without a safety monitor,” along with a video showing the inside of a Tesla stopped at a red light. There was no one in the driver’s seat, and the video was taken from the back seat. The video seems to prove that what Elon Musk said is true: The Tesla robotaxis is truly driverless today, just like the Waymo ride.

Tesla’s vice president of Software, Ashok Elluswamy, too posted on January 22 that Tesla “started some unsupervised vehicles integrated into the wider Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors.”

Since that day, small fish Tesla fans posted on X about hoping to find an unsupervised Tesla robotaxis. And it’s possible that unsupervised rides for paying customers are happening anonymously, but it seems the company is giving preview rides to Tesla’s most loyal influencers, and maybe even a human-driven Tesla right behind the robotaxi every step of the way.

For example, since unsupervised rides have been announced, Tesla influencer David Moss, famously claimed (with some real evidence) that he was traveling down the coast in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, struggling to work looking for one.

42 Tesla Robotaxi Rides
42 L
1 objective to find an unattended Model Y

It’s hard to get a ride on the app & every trip I take I see legitimately 4-5 cars mapping the area that could be on the app

This is also my 5th consecutive ride with the drivers supervisor… pic.twitter.com/fxAvY4dWrx

– David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 28, 2026

According to a post on X on Tuesday—five days after Musk’s announcement—Moss has taken 42 Tesla robotaxi rides, more than eight per day, and they all have supervisors not just in front, but behind the wheel. Tesla replaced these managers from the passenger seat to the driver seat back in September.

It is unclear whether TSLA99T claims to have received an unsupervised ride in the Tesla robotaxi as a paying customer. On the same day as the TSLA99T ride, Joe Tegtmeyer—a noted Tesla super-obsessive—also rode in one of the “unguarded” Teslas, only to be revealed to be the one guarded by a chase car. This is definitely an unwieldy way to run an app-based robotaxi operation.

According to Electrek (who first reported this story) Tesla stock rose 4% on the news of unsupervised robotaxis. Some titles have seems to have taken the bait as wellwhich gives the impression that truly driverless rides will be available to the public.

But, as Gizmodo writes the day after Musk’s announcementit appears that the rare “chase car” version of a theoretically unsupervised robotaxi may be the same version of an unsupervised Tesla robotaxi currently on the road, but paying customers can’t even access it.

As of this writing Wednesday night, Moss claimed unsuccessfully to take 54 robotaxi rides on an unsupervised deer chase.

54 is not my magic number because I need to get one more ride in a Tesla Robotaxi before bed lol pic.twitter.com/rgEMIXRbig

– David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 29, 2026

On Tesla’s earnings call that happened while Moss was still on his quest, Elon Musk talking about unsupervised drivingsaying that testing is happening in multiple cities, and that he and his company are “really paranoid about safety.”

Gizmodo reached out to Tesla for information about whether any unsupervised rides were provided to paying customers, and whether any such rides involved a chase car. We’ll update when we hear back.