Tesla extended its Austin robotaxi hours to 11 p.m., and CEO Elon Musk said Saturday the main challenge now is avoiding pets that are hard to see at night.
Key Points:
- Tesla's Austin robotaxi service now runs until 11 p.m., one hour later than before.
- Musk said spotting pets on dark roads is the main problem the company is trying to solve.
- Federal regulators are separately investigating how Tesla's driving software handles poor visibility.
Tesla Robotaxi Hours
Musk wrote on X that robotaxi operating hours had moved to 11 p.m. from 10 p.m., reposting a company notice that the Austin service now runs later. "The main thing we're trying to solve is making sure that we don't run over pets when they're hard to see at night," he said. He added that the company was "literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark."
Tesla launched the service in Austin in June 2025 after years of delays and has since expanded it to other Texas cities and Florida. Rides ran until midnight at launch, an hour later than the new cutoff.
Tesla says its robotaxis navigate with cameras and sensors, and its vehicle manuals warn that unlit or poorly lit roads can limit what the cameras capture. Musk pointed to software as the answer. "Visual spectrum cameras can see very well in the dark when AI is doing the photon count analysis," he replied to one commenter.
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Waymo Lidar Comparison
Critics say the limitation is an old one. The sun sets shortly after 7 p.m. in Austin at this time of year, so the cars already drive in darkness for hours each night.
Fred Lambert, an editor who covers electric vehicles, argued that cameras need light and contrast to pick out objects, and a grey animal on dark pavement offers little of either.
Lidar fires its own laser pulses and maps an object's shape in any lighting, he wrote, adding that Waymo pairs it with cameras and radar on cars that run around the clock.
Tesla removed radar from its vehicles in 2021 and has never shipped one with lidar.
Neither approach has ended animal strikes. A Waymo vehicle killed a 9-year-old tabby cat named KitKat in San Francisco last October, and a dog hit by a Tesla robotaxi in Austin in September 2025 ran away, the company told regulators.
Musk Night-Vision Claims
Musk has dismissed lidar for years. He called the technology "a fool's errand" in April 2019, and in May he posted camera images that he said showed why Tesla's Full Self-Driving software "can see so well at night or through extreme glare." Federal regulators are separately investigating how that software handles sun glare, fog and airborne dust in about 3.2 million Teslas, a probe they upgraded in March after nine crashes, including one death.
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