Elon Musk is once again promising a near future where Teslas in Austin glide through traffic with no one behind the wheel. At a recent artificial intelligence event, he said Tesla has “pretty much solved” fully autonomous driving and that driverless Robotaxis in the city are only about three weeks away. The claim raises the stakes not just for Austin’s streets, but for the broader debate over how quickly unsupervised self-driving should move from demo to daily life.
I see this latest pledge as a collision point between ambition, safety, and trust. On one side is Musk’s insistence that Tesla’s FSD Unsupervised is ready for prime time, and on the other is a long trail of missed timelines, scaled-back pilots, and unresolved questions about what “solved” really means when lives are on the line.
Musk’s new three-week promise, in his own words
When Elon Musk tells an audience that FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point,” he is not just talking about a software update, he is signaling that Tesla is ready to cross a psychological line from driver assistance to true autonomy. At the same event, he tied that confidence directly to a concrete pledge: Robotaxis in Austin that operate without human drivers in roughly three weeks. In his framing, the technology has matured enough that the company can move from supervised FSD, where a human is expected to intervene, to a mode where the car is meant to handle the entire trip on its own.
That framing matters because it suggests Tesla sees the remaining work as incremental polish rather than fundamental research. Musk’s comments about FSD Unsupervised being “pretty much solved” and Robotaxis “launching” in Austin within weeks present autonomy as a solved engineering problem waiting only on deployment. He has even linked this push to broader ambitions, such as the need to build a “giant chip fab” to support Tesla’s artificial intelligence workload, which underscores how central he believes FSD is to the company’s future. The message to investors and fans is clear: the long-promised Robotaxi era is not some distant dream, it is supposedly around the corner in a specific city with a specific countdown.
What “fully driverless” in Austin is supposed to look like
When Musk talks about Austin getting fully driverless Robotaxis, he is not describing a vague pilot tucked away on a test track. He has said that vehicles in the city will operate without safety drivers, with Tesla removing the human monitors that have historically sat ready to take over. In his telling, the cars will navigate real streets, real intersections, and real school zones on their own, relying on FSD Unsupervised to interpret the world and respond correctly. The promise is that a rider in Austin will be able to summon a Tesla that arrives empty, drives them to their destination, and then continues on to the next fare without anyone touching the steering wheel…