There are now publicly available robotaxis in Austin with no safety driver in the vehicle.

You can find the video of this first-ever public real Tesla robotaxi ride by an ex-Tesla AI engineer here.

And Joe Tegtmeyer, the OG drone observer for Giga Texas, managed to get one of these rides too, filming the whole experience.

Some of the things the Tesla AI team said when reposting the two videos:

Dhaval Shroff: “Our safety monitor called in sick this morning. So we just decided to drive off without them.”

Ashok Elluswamy: “Robotaxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.”

Julian Ibarz (Optimus AI Lead): “Robotaxi has scaled so far with safety drivers, now we're starting to scale with no safety drivers. Huge accomplishment by the team, excited to see how fast we can scale this service this year.”

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Our X of the week is connected to our YT video this time:

Elon is talking about chips again.

And yes, Dojo is back, as Elon says: “Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3”

And on that post, we got a little peek behind the curtain as Clive Chan, who previously led workload on Dojo1 (now at OpenAI), quoted this saying:

And then, while we’re at it, Elon also noted that AI5 was existential to Tesla, which he hasn’t said very often, so it carries some weight:

Tesla enters Slovakia

Tesla has officially opened its operations in Slovakia, with a pop-up store in Bratislava, a local SK configuration page, and a three-day opening event at the Eurovea Mall Promenade in downtown Bratislava.

The Tesla Owners Slovakia club gave a warm welcome to Tesla in the form of a light show in front of the Slovak National Theater:

By the way, this is what the Tesla pop-up store looks like:

Per the local EV site MojElektromobil.sk, this is also where Tesla plans its new Showroom (and likely service center?) replacing a former Jeep and Dodge dealership after finishing renovation of the building.

Tesla has used the pop-up Store approach several times by now when launching in a new country, such as in Czechia and Lithuania. This might also give us a hint on the timeline: in Lithuania’s case, the pop-up Store was opened in September 2024, while the Service center was opened on December 18th, 2024, so within three months.

Tesla has been quite busy in new market entries recently — just a week before this, I broke the news about Tesla officially entering Estonia and Latvia, there’s also some buzz around Morocco, and in case you missed it, one of the recent official launch was in Colombia.

Well, all the other news on robotaxi, after the big breaking news we already covered up front.

Tesla has begun informing U.S. customers that the free FSD transfer offer will end on March 31, 2026.

This seems likely connected to the end of the FSD lifetime purchase option by Feb 14th.

After that, only FSD monthly/yearly subscription will be available.

Also, I believe Tesla might untie the FSD from the car and onto the owners’ account after this, but note that it’s just my opinion and there’s been no info about this so far.

On the Cybercab production that should start in <100 days, Elon says:

“With the important caveat that initial production is always very slow and follows an S-curve. The speed of the production ramp is inversely proportionate to how many new parts and steps there are. For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast.”

And on ARK Invest predicting Cybercab will cost less than $0.20 per mile at scale in 2030, Elon replied: “probably true”.

Cybercab was now spotted in Massachusetts

Cybercab seen on Chicago streets, seems Tesla has added a rear camera washer. Wondering if this will trickle down as a feature for other models, too.

And a Cybercab found in Austin testing, which (finally) has no mirrors.

A (currently) small US insurance startup, Lemonade, has announced that it will offer a 50% rate cut for drivers of Tesla vehicles when FSD is steering because it has data showing it is reducing accidents.

Will Tesla replace the HW3 at all? Seems that a new patent shows what Tesla wants to do: let modern, high-precision AI models run on older, lower-precision hardware using clever math and software, instead of requiring brand-new silicon.

Instead of forcing high-precision data into low-precision hardware, Tesla splits the data into smaller chunks that AI3 can handle.

Someone mentioned this "Requires 4x the operations though (if doing full precision multiplication). So effective clock speed is only 1/4 of whatever HW3 baseline is (for those operations)." Elon answered: "This has already been implemented and is used only for longer bit length operations, which are relatively rare. Overall compute is extremely efficient."

Elon vs OpenAI heats up, Elon is looking for $79B up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.

But things do look to be in his favor thought with the recently surfaced conversations there.

The big part that came out was this where it seems that Brockman's discussions with Sama showed they know very well what they did in pushing Elon out and planning to go non-profit to profit, knew it was wrong and did it anyway.

Elon said a bit after this: "Can’t wait to start the trial. The discovery and testimony will blow your mind." So there's more incoming…

The Elon vs CEO of Ryanair went viral, and… Ryanair's CEO (& marketing dept) are milking it as much as they can.

The CEO of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary is known for getting different kind of viral ways of publicity with usual antagonist takes, and looks like Elon walked into it.

It started with Ryanair CEO saying they don't plan to add Starlink: "We don't want to install Starlink because of the 2% increase on drag and our customers don't want to pay for it."

(It's a super low-cost airline, so it would kind of make sense)

Elon first said something more polite in a discussion on X over drag (the actual Starlink numbers estimated by Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering there) including the "Also, they will lose customers to airlines that do have Internet."

Elon also sai that: "He is being misinformed. I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately, especially for a one hour flight, where the incremental drag is basically zero during the ascent phase due to high angle of attack. And compared to most other connectivity solutions, there would actually be gains in efficiency."

But then the CEO of Ryanair went personal on some podcast or news show, saying Elon knows nothing about drag and that he is an idiot, a rich one, but still an idiot.

Things escalated.

As I said, Ryanair takes all chances at publicity, so they created a whole campaign: (yes this is real)

At a press conference, O’Leary said:

See the full talk of his in this video posted by Sawyer Merritt.

By the way, over 2,500 airplanes now have Starlink installed, including 16 commercial airlines.

Colossus 2 goes live, the first Gigawatt training cluster in the world. Upgrades to 1.5GW in April. It also features ~600 Tesla Megapacks

Boring Company launched the Tunnel Vision Challenge, where you can submit a proposal on where that tunnel should be, and one 1-mile tunnel will be built by TBC for free.

Also, The Boring Company is working with a Nevada state-affiliated group to study a tunnel project that would go under the nine-mile stretch of highway from Reno to Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, which could help alleviate traffic.

Watch tip: here's a 47-minute video by Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley who spent 4 hours with Steve Davis, company President, viewing the operations etc. Davis talked a lot of details (like a lot).