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Tesla's vice president of AI, leading development of its Autopilot/Full Self-Driving software and robotaxi program.
A wheel-free robotaxi carrying employees on public roads is a controlled pilot, not a product. The reported gap to the paid Austin fleet is a few days, and that interval is the thing to time.
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Tesla is running two-seaters with no steering wheel in parts of Austin and NHTSA says only that it is evaluating. Federal rules are permissive about testing and strict about sales, so the unannounced fare is the number to watch.
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Two robotaxi builders put the same question to the same regulator by different routes. What each got back now decides fleet size, staffing, and whether the car has a steering wheel at all. The door is a hardware decision.
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The wheel-free car gets its production moment in Austin on Thursday, but the fleet it joins is still mostly Model Y, and the Bay Area will not let Tesla run any of it without a driver behind the wheel.
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Robotaxi Tracker says every Austin ride it logged over two weeks ran unsupervised, seven months after Musk said the monitors were gone. The instrument is one person's crowdsourced site.
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