Tesla announces Robotaxi has driven 1 million unsupervised miles

This is car news, not a home energy story, but here is what happened. Tesla says its Robotaxi self-driving cars have now driven 1 million miles without any human supervising the vehicle. Tesla uses "unsupervised" to mean the car's own software handles all the driving, with no person controlling it at all. The company added 620,000 of those miles in just the last six weeks, a much faster pace than the roughly 380,000 miles it had logged over the prior year and a half.

Tesla's Robotaxi service started in Austin last year with human "safety drivers" in the front seat, then moved to remote human backup, and is now mostly running without any person in the loop. The company also introduced its Cybercab vehicle at an event this week, though reports say only 45 have been registered for use in Austin so far, a small number compared to the Model Y robotaxis already on the road there. Tesla is also starting to sell its self-driving fleet technology to businesses, rather than letting regular owners who bought the "Full Self-Driving" software use it this way.

For scale, Tesla's rival Waymo has already driven 200 million unsupervised miles and operates in 14 cities. None of this changes anything for homeowners directly, but it is a sign that driverless ride services may keep expanding to more cities over time.