FSD & Autopilot

Tesla switched on its autonomous Robotaxi service in Miami on 3 July 2026, making Florida the third state to get driverless rides after Texas and California. The launch zone is small, and it lands a year after the service began as Tesla still struggles to scale in Texas.

Tesla has begun engineering tests of its first production Cybercab on public roads in Austin, the first time a customer-spec unit of the purpose-built robotaxi has driven outside the factory. The two-seater has no steering wheel or pedals, in line with Tesla's Level 4 self-certification, though a safety monitor still rides along in the passenger seat.

Tesla has published an official First Responder Interaction Plan for the Cybercab, its purpose-built robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. The guide details how the driverless two-seater detects emergency vehicles, pulls over and yields, recognises hand signals, and lets responders speak to remote Tesla staff through B-pillar microphones — confirming the car is meant to operate with no one behind a wheel that does not exist.

The family of a 76-year-old woman killed when a Tesla Model 3 crashed into her Texas home is suing Tesla and the driver, alleging an Autopilot 'design defect' — a claim Tesla disputes, saying the driver overrode the system by flooring the accelerator.

Finland's transport regulator Traficom says it may approve Tesla FSD (Supervised) on a faster schedule after the summer, potentially ahead of the EU-wide committee decision expected in October 2026. Traficom calls the system promising but still wants answers on driver takeover, low-visibility overtaking and the speed-offset feature that worries neighbouring Sweden and Norway.

A Tesla Model 3 in driver-assist mode left the road in Katy, Texas on 19 June 2026 and crashed into a home, killing a 76-year-old woman inside. The driver says Autopilot was engaged, and the NHTSA is investigating the crash against the backdrop of an existing probe covering more than three million Model 3s.

Tesla has started pushing Full Self-Driving (Supervised) V14 to cars in Australia and New Zealand through software update 2026.16.6, which carries build v14.3.3. The first wave is limited to Hardware 4 vehicles, so current Model 3 and Model Y owners get it first, while HW3 cars wait for a lighter version or a retrofit. It arrives roughly a year after Tesla first brought FSD to the two markets.

Tesla has quietly killed a workaround that let drivers dismiss the mandatory FSD disengagement feedback menu by double-tapping the microphone. A new minimum recording time now forces owners to either wait or pick a reason.

The European Transport Safety Council wrote to transport ministers across the EU on 12 June 2026, urging them to demand evidence on the safety of Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) before accepting its provisional European approval. The road-safety body criticises the closed-door committee process that could make hands-off driving legal continent-wide and wants the European Commission to pause and hold a public debate first.

A Reuters investigation reports Tesla gave Dutch and Swedish regulators self-published FSD safety statistics that independent researchers call misleading; the Netherlands says its approval did not rest on those figures, while US senators have asked NHTSA to review the same claims.

Plastic doll heads sold for $20-50 on Chinese platforms are tricking Tesla's cabin camera into reading an attentive driver, the latest move in a long arms race over driver monitoring as FSD expands in Europe.

Tesla expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi geofence to cover the entire Austin metro area (~245 sq mi) on 3 June 2026, and detailed how the cars hand control to first responders and can be geofenced around emergencies. The catch: the active driverless fleet is still only about 20 cars, a fraction of Waymo's.

Belgium has authorised Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) for use on public roads, becoming the fifth European country to allow the feature after the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark. The Flemish approval applies nationwide.

Tesla's first European FSD safety report shows cars running FSD (Supervised) in the Netherlands had 3.5x fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas between 10 April and 5 June 2026 — including zero collisions across 16.6M highway kilometres.

Denmark's Road Traffic Authority, Færdselsstyrelsen, approved Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on 9 June 2026, making Denmark the fourth European country to greenlight the system in roughly eight weeks. The authority accepted the Dutch RDW's provisional type approval after its own independent review. Rollout to Danish owners is expected to begin soon.

Tesla has applied to Nevada regulators for a commercial robotaxi permit covering the Las Vegas area, requesting authority to run up to 5,000 autonomous vehicles in the first year — a filing far larger than its current fleet of roughly two dozen cars.

Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy presented a slide listing every country awaiting Full Self-Driving regulatory approval. For Europe, that means more than 30 markets are still in the queue behind the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Three Tesla owners drove a Model 3 from Vancouver to Halifax on FSD (Supervised) v14.3.3 between 25 and 29 May 2026, covering 3,760 miles (6,051 km) in 4 days 21 hours without a single disengagement. Tesla's Autopilot lead Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated the team.

Tesla self-certified its Cybercab as an SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicle under a new Texas commercial-AV law that became enforceable on 28 May 2026. The same day, Elon Musk shared video of gold Cybercabs driving themselves out of Giga Texas with no driver and no safety chase. Volume production has been underway since April 2026.

Estonia's Transport Administration approved Tesla FSD (Supervised) on 29 May 2026, making it the third European country to allow the system after the Netherlands and Lithuania. Estonia accepted the Dutch RDW type approval under EU Regulation 2018/858 rather than running an independent review, so a customer rollout can begin without further delays.

Tesla switched on FSD (Supervised) in Lithuania on 20 May 2026, making it the second EU country to allow the system on public roads. The Lithuanian Transport Safety Administration recognised the Dutch RDW type approval under EU mutual-recognition rules — a faster path than the independent national testing programmes underway in Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. Lithuanian owners receive the same FSD v14.3.3 stack now shipping in the Netherlands.

Andrej Karpathy — the OpenAI co-founder who led Tesla's Autopilot and FSD programmes from 2017 to 2022 — has joined Anthropic's pre-training team, reporting to team lead Nick Joseph. The hire intensifies an already-sharp talent war between Anthropic and OpenAI, and lands at a moment when Tesla is leaning more publicly than ever on the AI roadmap Karpathy helped lay down.

Teslarati reported on 18 May 2026 that Tesla's internal Robotaxi app version 26.4.5 introduces a high-security command capable of freezing a vehicle's ability to drive — pulling it from the fleet and preventing it from being put into gear even with valid keys — alongside new remote operations and safety-protocol code. The update lands as Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet has grown from 9 cars at the start of April to 39 by mid-May 2026.

Speaking on Monday 18 May 2026, Elon Musk said Tesla's driverless Robotaxi service will reach roughly a quarter to half of the US population by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval — with no-safety-monitor vehicles becoming widespread later in 2026. Tesla already operates fully unsupervised vehicles in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, and is targeting four more cities in the first half of the year.