Will we conclude Tesla launched level 4 robotaxis in summer 2025?
Elon Musk has been very explicit in promising a robotaxi launch in Austin in June with unsupervised full self-driving (FSD). We'll give him some leeway on the timing and say this counts as a YES if it happens by the end of August. As of April 2025, Tesla seems to be testing this with employees and with supervised FSD and doubling down on the public Austin launch. PS: A big monkey wrench no one anticipated when we created this market is how to treat the passenger-seat safety monitors. See FAQ9 for how we're trying to handle that in a principled way. Tesla is very polarizing and I know it's "obvious" to one side that safety monitors = "supervised" and that it's equally obvious to the other side that the driver's seat being empty is what matters. I can't emphasize enough how not obvious any of this is. At least so far, speaking now in August 2025. FAQ 1. Does it have to be a public launch? Yes, but we won't quibble about waitlists. As long as even 10 non-handpicked members of the public have used the service by the end of August, that's a YES. Also if there's a waitlist, anyone has to be able to get on it and there has to be intent to scale up. In other words, Tesla robotaxis have to be actually becoming a thing, with summer 2025 as when it started. If it's invite-only and Tesla is hand-picking people, that's not a public launch. If it's viral-style invites with exponential growth from the start, that's likely to be within the spirit of a public launch. A potential litmus test is whether serious journalists and Tesla haters end up able to try the service. UPDATE: We're deeming this to be satisfied. 2. What if there's a human backup driver in the driver's seat? This importantly does not count. That's supervised FSD. 3. But what if the backup driver never actually intervenes? Compare to Waymo, which goes millions of miles between [injury-causing] incidents. If there's a backup driver we're going to presume that it's because interventions are still needed, even if rarely. 4. What if it's only available for certain fixed routes? That would resolve NO. It has to be available on unrestricted public roads [restrictions like no highways is ok] and you have to be able to choose an arbitrary destination. I.e., it has to count as a taxi service. 5. What if it's only available in a certain neighborhood? This we'll allow. It just has to be a big enough neighborhood that it makes sense to use a taxi. Basically anything that isn't a drastic restriction of the environment. 6. What if they drop the robotaxi part but roll out unsupervised FSD to Tesla owners? This is unlikely but if this were level 4+ autonomy where you could send your car by itself to pick up a friend, we'd call that a YES per the spirit of the question. 7. What about level 3 autonomy? Level 3 means you don't have to actively supervise the driving (like you can read a book in the driver's seat) as long as you're available to immediately take over when the car beeps at you. This would be tantalizingly close and a very big deal but is ultimately a NO. My reason to be picky about this is that a big part of the spirit of the question is whether Tesla will catch up to Waymo, technologically if not in scale at first. 8. What about tele-operation? The short answer is that that's not level 4 autonomy so that would resolve NO for this market. This is a common misconception about Waymo's phone-a-human feature. It's not remotely (ha) like a human with a VR headset steering and braking. If that ever happened it would count as a disengagement and have to be reported. See Waymo's blog post with examples and screencaps of the cars needing remote assistance. To get technical about the boundary between a remote human giving guidance to the car vs remotely operating it, grep "remote assistance" in Waymo's advice letter filed with the California Public Utilities Commission last month. Excerpt: The Waymo AV [autonomous vehicle] sometimes reaches out to Waymo Remote Assistance for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Remote Assistance team supports the Waymo AV with information and suggestions [...] Assistance is designed to be provided quickly - in a mater of seconds - to help get the Waymo AV on its way with minimal delay. For a majority of requests that the Waymo AV makes during everyday driving, the Waymo AV is able to proceed driving autonomously on its own. In very limited circumstances such as to facilitate movement of the AV out of a freeway lane onto an adjacent shoulder, if possible, our Event Response agents are able to remotely move the Waymo AV under strict parameters, including at a very low speed over a very short distance. Tentatively, Tesla needs to meet the bar for autonomy that Waymo has set. But if there are edge cases where Tesla is close enough in spirit, we can debate that in the comments. 9. What about human safety monitors in the passenger seat? Oh geez, it's like Elon Musk is trolling us to maximize the ambiguity of these market resolutions. Tentatively (we'll keep discussing in the comments) my verdict on this question depends on whether the human safety monitor has to be eyes-on-the-road the whole time with their finger on a kill switch or emergency brake. If so, I believe that's still level 2 autonomy. Or sub-4 in any case. See also FAQ3 for why this matters even if a kill switch is never actually used. We need there not only to be no actual disengagements but no counterfactual disengagements. Like imagine that these robotaxis would totally mow down a kid who ran into the road. That would mean a safety monitor with an emergency brake is necessary, even if no kids happen to jump in front of any robotaxis before this market closes. Waymo, per the definition of level 4 autonomy, does not have that kind of supervised self-driving. 10. Will we ultimately trust Tesla if it reports it's genuinely level 4? I want to avoid this since I don't think Tesla has exactly earned our trust on this. I believe the truth will come out if we wait long enough, so that's what I'll be inclined to do. If the truth seems impossible for us to ascertain, we can consider resolve-to-PROB. 11. Will we trust government certification that it's level 4? Yes, I think this is the right standard. Elon Musk said on 2025-07-09 that Tesla was waiting on regulatory approval for robotaxis in California and expected to launch in the Bay Area "in a month or two". I'm not sure what such approval implies about autonomy level but I expect it to be evidence in favor. (And if it starts to look like Musk was bullshitting, that would be evidence against.) 12. What if it's still ambiguous on August 31? Then we'll extend the market close. The deadline for Tesla to meet the criteria for a launch is August 31 regardless. We just may need more time to determine, in retrospect, whether it counted by then. I suspect that with enough hindsight the ambiguity will resolve. Note in particular FAQ1 which says that Tesla robotaxis have to be becoming a thing (what "a thing" is is TBD but something about ubiquity and availability) with summer 2025 as when it started. Basically, we may need to look back on summer 2025 and decide whether that was a controlled demo, done before they actually had level 4 autonomy, or whether they had it and just were scaling up slowing and cautiously at first. 13. If safety monitors are still present, say, a year later, is there any way for this to resolve YES? No, that's well past the point of presuming that Tesla had not achieved level 4 autonomy in summer 2025. 14. What if they ditch the safety monitors after August 31st but tele-operation is still a question mark? We'll also need transparency about tele-operation and disengagements. If that doesn't happen by June 22, 2026 (a year after the robotaxi launch) then that too is a presumed NO. Ask more clarifying questions! I'll be super transparent about my thinking and will make sure the resolution is fair if I have a conflict of interest due to my position in this market. [Ignore any auto-generated clarifications below this line. I'll add to the FAQ as needed. Text in brackets is my own voice.] [Apparently I said in a comment on 2025-11-01 something about wanting to see a roughly exponential deployment graph in the year following the launch and that a flat graph would suffice for NO? Not that what I say off-hand in comments counts if I don't add it to the FAQ. But do grill me if I contradict myself at all!] [On 2025-12-10 we talked about Elon Musk's November 6th, 2025 statement: "Now that we believe we have full self-driving / autonomy solved, or within a few months of having unsupervised autonomy solved... We're on the cusp of that" which sure sounds like admitting they weren't at level 4.] [More discussion on 2026-01-31 of the possible passenger-seat emergency stop button and how it depends on how real-time it is.] [On 2026-02-01 I apparently proposed that on June 22, 2026, we could resolve NO if we still didn't have transparency on all the ways Tesla could potentially be cheating. And that if Tesla started shooting past Waymo by then, that might start looking like a YES.] [On 2026-02-02 I apparently defined supervision as a human in the loop in real time, watching and ready to intervene. And real-time disengagement means the human controlling the car in some way. The car getting stuck and asking for help is not a real-time disengagement.] [Also on 2026-02-02 I apparently had some preliminary analysis suggesting robotaxis were subhumanly safe, but I later dug deeper and that didn't hold up.] [We're taking human-level safety to be part of the requirements to count as level-4 autonomous.]
