Nobody is behind the wheel anymore, and Miami is only the beginning
Tesla switched on robotaxis in Miami with no one in the front seat. Waymo and Zoox are already circling, and Musk's real bet was never about selling cars.
In Miami you can now hail a cab with nobody behind the wheel at all. Tesla has switched on its robotaxi service in yet another American metropolis — the company announced it on the service's official social media account. But for Musk this is far more than a new dot on the map. It is a test of his biggest bet: Tesla wants less and less to be just an electric-car maker, and more and more to sell investors the image of an AI company.
The cars run on a proprietary version of Tesla's self-driving software. The service already launched in Austin back in June, and the company later announced plans for Dallas and Houston. Now it is Miami's turn — a city with heavy traffic, a flood of tourists and enormous demand for rides. In other words, a place with ideal commercial logic for a robotaxi.
Except the market is no longer empty. Alphabet is aggressively expanding driverless rides through Waymo, Amazon is pushing its own Zoox — and for Tesla every new city becomes a race not only of technology, but of trust. And frankly, riders do not care about presentations. They care about simple things: will the car drive predictably, how much does a trip cost, who takes the blame when something fails, and how safe is any of this in real traffic.
Back in May, Musk promised that fully self-driving cars without human safety monitors would spread much wider across the US in the second half of the year. And that is the crucial line. As long as a monitor sits in the cabin or the zones stay tightly restricted, the robotaxi looks like a pilot project — nothing more. But the moment Tesla drops the safety net and starts scaling, the question leaps straight from technological to regulatory and insurance-related.
And the timing could hardly be better for Tesla. Just a day earlier the company reported record deliveries for the second quarter — beating Wall Street expectations, with a rebound in European demand doing the heavy lifting. But selling cars and running robotaxis are two very different stories. Here Tesla is trying to prove the one thing that matters: that its cars can keep earning after the sale, instead of just gathering dust in the owner's garage.