Elon Musk has repeatedly promised that Tesla is only months away from launching a driverless robotaxi service in California once regulators approve it. But state Department of Motor Vehicles records and comments from a state spokesperson indicate Tesla took no steps last year to obtain the additional permits that would be required to run driverless robotaxis in California.
The DMV records show Tesla logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California public roads in 2025 - a continuation of a trend that, according to the documents, marks the sixth year in a row without recorded autonomous testing miles in the state. In California’s regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles, documenting test miles is a central requirement as companies move through a sequence of permits that ultimately allow driverless ride-hailing services to operate commercially.
Many investors attach significant value to Tesla’s autonomous-driving prospects. Much of the company’s approximate $1.5 trillion market valuation is tied to expectations that it will deploy a large robotaxi fleet and sell millions of software subscriptions for autonomous driving. Operating in California - the largest U.S. auto market - figures prominently in those expectations.
But regulatory and administrative steps remain in place before a company can run driverless vehicles for commercial service in the state. To reach the stage of operating fully self-driving, driverless vehicles like those run by Alphabet’s Waymo, a company must obtain an array of permits from California’s DMV and from the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees commercial ride-hailing activity.
According to a DMV spokesperson, Tesla holds only an entry-level DMV permit that allows testing driverless vehicle features only when a human safety monitor occupies the driver’s seat. The company has not applied for the additional permits that would permit testing and operating vehicles without a safety operator, the spokesperson said.
Proposed DMV regulations that are expected to be finalized later this year would require companies to log at least 50,000 miles of autonomous driving on public roads in California with a safety driver before applying for a permit allowing driverless testing without a human in the seat. Tesla has not logged any testing miles with state regulators since 2019 and has documented a cumulative total of 562 miles since 2016, the records show.
By contrast, Waymo recorded more than 13 million testing miles and obtained seven distinct regulatory approvals between 2014 and 2023, the year it gained permission to charge passengers for rides in driverless robotaxis. Waymo is listed as one of three companies authorized in California to commercially operate driverless vehicles, and is the only one approved to run a robotaxi fleet resembling the scale and model Musk has described.
In practice, Tesla’s publicly visible autonomous offerings in recent months do not equate to fully driverless robotaxis as regulators define them. The company operates a limited robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, where local regulations are less restrictive than in California. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Tesla introduced a service last July that it branded as a "robotaxi" offering; state regulators and vehicle disclosures, however, characterize that service as a chauffeur operation in which human drivers use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving driver-assistance software. California regulators and Tesla’s own disclosures say that software is not fully autonomous.
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert in autonomous driving who has worked with the California DMV, said the company’s public messaging creates the impression that regulators are the bottleneck. "Tesla is implying that they are ready and regulators are not," he said, adding that the opposite is true: "regulators are ready, and they are not."
Tesla did not provide a comment on the DMV records and permit status when asked.
Musk has addressed regulatory constraints directly in conversations with investors. On an October earnings call, he described the company as "paranoid about safety" and said Tesla takes a "cautious approach" to entering new markets. "We probably could just let it loose in these cities," he said, "but we just don’t want to take a chance." He also characterized the California approval process as ‘‘quite a long regulatory approval process’’ and said he would be "shocked if we don’t get approved next year," while acknowledging that the company does not fully control the timing.
Last year, Tesla submitted written comments criticizing some of the DMV’s proposed revisions to autonomous-driving rules. In those comments, the company questioned the necessity of state-road testing and minimum-mile requirements and said certain reporting requirements for crashes and system failures were "overly burdensome."
Those objections, along with Tesla’s lack of additional permit applications and absence of recorded autonomous testing miles in California for 2025, contrast with the public expectation fostered by Musk’s repeated statements that a California robotaxi launch is imminent.
Context note: The facts in this report are based on state DMV records and statements by a state spokesperson. Where the public record is limited, the article reflects those limits rather than filling gaps with unverified detail.