Tesla

Tesla, Inc. is an electric-vehicle and energy company that was incorporated in Delaware on July 1, 2003, became a Texas corporation on June 13, 2024, and has its principal executive offices at 1 Tesla Road, Austin, Texas. Its annual report says it is “focused on bringing artificial intelligence (‘AI’) into the real world” through FSD (Supervised), Robotaxi and the Optimus robot.¹ MetaRoles covers Tesla only where those products touch human roles: driving, ride-hailing and factory work.

FSD (Supervised), Tesla’s driver-assistance software, isn’t a self-driving system by Tesla’s own description: it requires “active driver supervision” and “does not make the vehicle autonomous”.² When the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a preliminary evaluation of FSD on October 7, 2025, it wrote that Tesla characterizes FSD as “an SAE Level 2 partial automation system requiring a fully attentive driver”, and that “the driver remains fully responsible at all times for driving the vehicle”. The evaluation covers an estimated 2,882,566 vehicles and reports of FSD maneuvers that broke traffic laws; it is an inquiry, not a finding.³ Our explainer of the SAE driving levels uses FSD as its Level 2 example.

Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025 “with a safety rider”,⁴ and in January 2026 it “began removing the safety monitor from customer rides” there “on a limited basis”.⁵ Its Q2 2026 update lists six metros, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, as “Ramping Unsupervised”, and the San Francisco Bay Area as “Safety Driver”, where the service runs on FSD (Supervised) under a California charter-party carrier permit. The update doesn’t say what share of rides carry no Tesla employee. It also reports that Cybercab production began at Gigafactory Texas, and that Tesla is installing first-generation Optimus lines at its Fremont factory, with the initial builds to be used in its “Optimus Academy” for training data collection; it reports no Optimus working at a customer.² These rows appear in our feature on robotaxis and the taxi driver’s job. Tesla’s third-quarter 2026 results are due on October 21, 2026, and the figures here will be checked against them then.⁶