Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday that his company is now running a small number of its Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, without a human driver or safety supervisor on board.

“Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car,” Musk posted on X. “Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team!”

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of software, wrote in a separate post that the Austin Robotaxi service included, “a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors.” He said the ratio of driverless to supervised vehicles will increase over time in that market.

Tesla shares rose 4.2% on Thursday to close at $449.36.

Tesla lags behind several companies that are already operating commercial robotaxi services with no drivers or safety monitors present. Alphabet’s Waymo leads the U.S. market, while Baidu’s Apollo Go is out front in China with significant competition from WeRide.

Other players are joining the fray, as Amazon’s Zoox is now operating limited driverless services in the U.S., and startups like May Mobility and Nuro are developing their driverless offerings.

Musk said in July that Tesla would likely have “autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year.” The company fell far shy of that goal.

However, Tesla drummed up excitement with the launch of its Robotaxi ride-hailing app, and its initial services in Austin and the San Francisco Bay area.

In Texas, Tesla obtained a permit to run a transportation networking company, which allowed it to use “automated driving systems,” or driverless vehicles, there. But in California, Tesla has yet to obtain permits that would allow it to conduct driverless testing or robotaxi rides without a human at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Musk said, “I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point,” adding that he expects his company’s Robotaxi service will be “very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.”

Musk is notorious for missing his self-imposed timelines for grand technical or business achievements.

In 2019, he told investors that he was “very confident” the company would be able to turn its existing vehicles into robotaxis with a software update by the end of the following year.

With its EV sales sliding, Tesla’s ability to keep investors enthused may hinge on whether it can scale a driverless, ride-hailing service in the U.S. this year and upgrade the partially automated driving systems in its cars to a fully automated driving system. Today, its premium system is marketed as FSD (Supervised), and the company plans to sell an FSD Unsupervised system in the future.

Surveys by the Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report found a majority of U.S. consumers polled late last year did not want to ride in robotaxis, with particular concerns around safety.

Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note this week that they anticipated “muted underlying volume growth” for Tesla and EV maker Rivian this year with “autonomy and physical AI driving the narrative.” They also said, “Tesla will have to prove out FSD unsupervised and the scaling up of robotaxi (which in our view has been clearly tracking behind schedule) before garnering incremental valuation credit.”

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Late last year, California regulators found that Tesla had engaged in deceptive marketing and false advertising around their vehicles’ driverless capabilities. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently investigating Tesla to determine how often the company’s FSD systems may have caused traffic safety violations.

According to TeslaDeaths.com, which draws on NHTSA data, legal filings and press reports to track fatal Tesla collisions, 65 people have died in Tesla crashes that involved the use of Autopilot, including two in which the company’s FSD systems were engaged in the seconds leading up to the crash.

Tesla is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.

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