Musk's FSD Promises Miss 2025 Robotaxi Target

09 Jan 2026

Elon Musk’s repeated promises about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) have missed the mark again, The Verge reports. Musk had pledged unsupervised, fully driverless FSD — and a robotaxi service available to over 50 percent of the US population — by the end of 2025. In reality, Tesla’s robotaxi pilots in Austin and San Francisco still require a human safety monitor in the vehicle with a “kill switch,” and unsupervised outings appear limited.  




Musk now says Tesla needs roughly 10 billion miles of data to reach “safe unsupervised self‑driving.” Tesla’s FSD dashboard shows a bit more than 7 billion miles to date, raising the question of why the end‑of‑2025 promise was made when that metric hadn’t been met. The Verge points out the goalposts keep shifting (Musk previously suggested 6 billion miles in Tesla’s 2016 Master Plan Part Deux). The article also argues legal and liability considerations likely influence Tesla’s timeline: keeping a human driver responsible lets Tesla avoid taking full liability for incidents, unlike fully permitted autonomous services such as Waymo.