It’s Happening: Tesla Starts Removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors

Plus, we’re announcing a new Ride AI speaker each week. Here’s the first one.

Welcome to the Ride AI newsletter: your weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.

Here’s our first speaker.

Ride AI 2026 is shaping up to be a heck of an event! From the latest advancements in physical AI to what’s in store for autonomy, we have a full day of insights and analysis from the most important movers and shakers in the industry planned for you. To that end, we will be announcing a new confirmed speaker every week leading up to the event. Our first speaker announcement is:

Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve

If you don’t want to miss your chance to be where it actually matters, sign up for the waitlist. It takes less than 10 seconds to join, so do it now before spots run out…

We are also starting to sell out on sponsor opportunities at SFJAZZ Center, including a VIP dinner, after party and space for vehicles where attendees will be able get up close with the latest robots and AVs and get their own rides. If you are interested in sponsoring, get in touch at this form. Here are the first few of our publicly announced sponsors to date:

Now, Here’s What You Need To Know Today.

Lots happened in the Tesla sphere this week, so let’s break it down.

Finally: Tesla begins mixing in unsupervised robotaxi rides in Austin.

A video posted to X on January 23rd showed a Tesla Robotaxi trip in Austin, Texas with no safety monitor inside the vehicle. Instead, the safety monitor seemed to be moved to a chase car. Until now, Tesla’s limited Robotaxi pilots in Austin and San Francisco had relied on human safety monitors with access to a kill switch, with the monitor sitting in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither program is broadly open to the public, and both still operate through a waitlist.

The moving of the safety monitor from the ride vehicle to a chase vehicle is not unusual in the self-driving industry. Most well-known self driving companies have gone through this phase, as it is considered a responsible path to full driver out.

Tesla’s VP of autonomy, Ashok Elluswamy, later added that the company was starting with only a few unsupervised vehicles mixed into the broader fleet that still had monitors, with that ratio increasing over time, which seems reasonable. Any bets on how many unsupervised vehicles Tesla has by the end of 2026? Leave it in the comments below!

In addition to removing the driver, Tesla has finally seemingly updated its ride vehicle hardware to include sensor and camera cleaning. The absence of sensor cleaning hardware has been a major criticism of Tesla’s Robotaxi program since the beginning. Now, it seems they are updating their vehicles to address it. Of course, this means the vehicles are no longer just “normal” Model Ys, but they were never stock Model Ys to begin with. From the getgo, Tesla’s Robotaxi vehicles had modifications such as extra cellular hardware to stay in better contact with HQ. Now, the hardware has diverged even more from standard, meaning more steps to maintenance and getting further away from the dream of Joe Everyman putting his own Tesla on Tesla’s Robotaxi network.

Lemonade, an online-only insurance company, has announced a collaboration with Tesla that cuts rates for its per-mile-driven car insurance product by “around 50%” when the miles are driven on FSD. This is huge, as there are a number of firsts:

• Lemonade is the first 3rd party insurance company to get direct access to Tesla FSD’s safety statistics.

• Lemonade decided based on those statistics that FSD was so much safer than human driving, it warranted a 50% rate cut.

• Lemonade will continue to get detailed sensor-level data and continuously adjust rates, even based on the FSD software version.

Lemonade even mentioned that as FSD becomes safer, their pricing will drop. The statement that FSD driving is safer than human driving was a major founding principle of Tesla’s own insurance service, so the fact that a 3rd party company has not only validated it, but built a whole product around it is major.

Tesla has removed Autopilot on new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America. This means Traffic-Aware Cruise Control is now the standard ADAS Tesla includes in its cars, while Autosteer is now behind the new $99 per month Full Self-Driving subscription since Tesla has also moved FSD to subscription-only.

The change also came as Tesla faced regulatory and legal fallout in California over how it marketed its driver-assist capabilities, including a 30-day dealer and manufacturing suspension resulting from a December ruling that found deceptive marketing. The California DMV is giving the company a 60-day stay to come into compliance, including dropping the Autopilot brand name. This is a notable pivot from Tesla’s 2019 decision to make Basic Autopilot standard and reserve FSD as the paid upgrade during the same period the company launched its first “Autonomy Day,” and it now leaves many of the features buyers once expected by default tied to an ongoing subscription.

Buyers were, of course, not happy at all about this, and became even more unhappy after Elon followed up saying that the FSD subscription price could become even higher as FSD becomes more capable.

Congratulations are in order for Alex Roy.

Following David Moss’s 0-disengagement run on which we chatted with him last time, Alex and his team confirmed that they had completed a cross-country Tesla FSD run without any interventions as well. This attempt was actually something he alluded to during his talk on the Ride AI 2025 stage last year. You can see his full 6 minute 40 second Pecha Kucha talk above.

Make sure to get on the waitlist for a chance to see more talks like these this year!

In Other News…

• Waymo launches in Miami

• Waymo probed by National Transportation Safety Board over illegal school bus behavior

• Luminar founder Austin Russell agrees to accept subpoena in bankruptcy case

Alright, that’s it from me… until next week. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with your friend, colleague, or boss. Thank you for reading; Sophia out!