Tesla has expanded the geofence for its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, growing the area where vehicles can operate without a safety monitor inside the car. But social media sightings indicate that only a handful of vehicles — somewhere between 4 and 8 Model Ys — are actually running without a human safety monitor. And even those still operate under remote supervision from Tesla. Expanding the map, not the fleet The service area expansion is part of a pattern Tesla has followed since launching its robotaxi pilot in Austin in June 2025. The overall robotaxi geofence in Austin has grown to roughly 245 square miles — about 12 times its original 20-square-mile footprint — through a series of expansions over the past several months. But there’s a massive disconnect between the size of the map and the number of vehicles actually operating without supervision. According to tracking data and social media sightings, the unsupervised fleet consists of fewer than a dozen vehicles, with only a few operating at the same time. The total Austin fleet sits at roughly 37-42 vehicles, with the vast majority still carrying safety monitors. But now the “unsupervised” Tesla robotaxies can operate in a slightly larger area of the overall service area in Austin: It’s also worth emphasizing what “unsupervised” means in Tesla’s context. There’s no human safety monitor inside the car, but Tesla still remotely supervises these vehicles. Earlier in the program, that supervision involved physical chase cars trailing the robotaxis; now it appears to involve remote monitoring. Either way, these are not vehicles operating fully independently. Years behind schedule The expansion is real progress, but it needs to be placed in the context of what Tesla actually promised. CEO Elon Musk has a long, well-documented history of missing his own autonomous driving deadlines.