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Tesla Autopilot twists and turns through complex Sin City construction zone on its own
The owner of a Tesla Model S released footage of his electric sedan seamlessly navigating on Autopilot through the sharp and narrow twists and turns of a construction zone.
Model S owner Fred Hassen was traveling on South Las Vegas Boulevard in the “Sin City” while using the vehicle’s Navigate on Autopilot feature as part of the Full-Self Driving suite. The Model S car managed to recognize the confusing lane shifts and road changes and navigate through the cones and safety barrels that were set up by local construction crews. Hassen seemed pleased by his car’s flawless navigation through the make-shift lanes, as can be heard in his video.
The appearance of traffic cones and traffic light indicators on the Model S’ instrument cluster suggests that the vehicle is equipped with Tesla’s latest Hardware 3 and capable of responding to red traffic lights and stop signs, including automatically stopping.
Autopilot progress in clearly marked construction zones is mighty impressive https://t.co/tb1tsuRQaD
— TREV PAGE (@Model3Owners) April 23, 2020
Navigate on Autopilot is one of the most sophisticated driver-assistance features in the automotive industry today. The suite is capable of performing lane changes, navigating through on and off-ramps, and helping drivers make their way through confusing construction zones. The development of Tesla’s software for its self-driving features helps the company work toward a “feature complete” Full Self-Driving suite, which aims to revolutionize the act of driving for every owner in the world.
Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot systems were broken down by Andrej Karpathy, Director of the company’s AI team. Karpathy explained that Tesla’s use of vehicle cameras and artificial intelligence trains its neural network to help cars respond to road conditions safely and accurately. Tesla’s fleet of 1,000,000 vehicles uses “raw images to perform semantic segmentation, object detection, and monocular depth estimation,” according to its website. These images are then used as data to improve the safety of Autopilot.
The data compiled by the fleet of Tesla vehicles is critical to Tesla’s teams who determine improvements that need to be made within the company’s self-driving software. Tesla vehicles likely travel through construction zones every day, but the performance of the cars continues to improve through its continuously-learning Neural Network.
In the past, a Tesla hacker known as “green” has showed Tesla Autopilot’s thought process when navigating through construction zones.
and finally a bit of construction zone (this is the only one of the set where AP is actually on), nothing groundbreaking since it was widely reported already long ago, but still interesting to see it "from the inside": pic.twitter.com/TmGkqhGPQz
— green (@greentheonly) November 7, 2019
The technology seems to recognize cones as the guidance point for the lane, forgetting about painted “on-road” lines when construction zones are concerned. The car understands that the standard path of travel is obsolete because of construction. Autopilot instead uses the cones lined up on both sides of the lane as the new guidance markers for travel. This video is from a previous version of firmware, so the program has improved since then as more data has entered the Neural Network.
Tesla initial plans were to release the “feature complete” FSD suite by the end of 2019, but the program was not ready for a full release. After the company release Stop Sign and Traffic Light recognition in mid-April, all that is left for Tesla to unveil is city driving. As the cars seem to be navigating through tricky construction zones with relative ease, city street driving could roll out soon.
Elon Musk
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.
Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.
The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.
Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026
Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.
The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.
Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.
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Tesla crosses major Unsupervised Self-Driving milestone
Tesla has reached a notable benchmark in its autonomous driving program after its Robotaxi fleet surpassed one million miles of unsupervised operation. The company made the announcement during its Cybercab event in Austin on September 3.
Tesla Vice President of AI Ashok Elluswamy told attendees he was happy to report the fleet had achieved one million miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation as a testament to safety.
The new total marked a sharp increase from the 380,000 unsupervised miles Tesla disclosed during its second-quarter 2026 earnings update in late July.
In roughly six weeks, the company added about 620,000 miles. That acceleration followed Tesla’s decision to remove in-vehicle safety monitors from most of its operations outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Credit: Tesla
Tesla first launched Robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025 with safety drivers present. It later began fully unsupervised rides and expanded into Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. The San Francisco Bay Area remains the exception, where a safety monitor still rides in the vehicle under California permitting rules.
The company has not released a city-by-city breakdown of the one million unsupervised miles.
The milestone arrived as Tesla began offering public Cybercab rides in Austin. The purpose-built vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed only for autonomous ride-hailing. Production versions joined the existing fleet of modified Tesla vehicles already operating in the service.
Tesla’s unsupervised mileage is growing at a double-digit weekly rate according to earlier company comments, yet its fleet size remains modest compared with established competitors. Waymo has accumulated more than 200 million fully autonomous rider-only miles. Tesla has described its own unsupervised operations as having recorded zero notable incidents in the period leading up to the July update.
The one-million-mile figure reflects Tesla’s shift from supervised testing to broader driverless service in multiple states. It also highlights the company’s strategy of using both existing Model Y vehicles and the new Cybercab to scale its network.

Credit: Tesla
Whether the rapid recent growth continues will depend on further city expansions, regulatory approvals, and the performance of the purpose-built Cybercab in everyday paid rides. Tesla has not specified how many of the latest miles involved the new vehicle versus the rest of the fleet.
The announcement underscores Tesla’s progress toward a larger robotaxi network while illustrating the remaining gap in total autonomous experience relative to longer-operating rivals.
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Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when
Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this week that 24-hour Robotaxi service is close. Replying on X to a rider who wanted Cybercab trips all night, he wrote that the capability would arrive “next month or so” once “the next tech to merge on the v15 plan” is ready.
The comment landed on September 4, one day after Tesla opened public Cybercab rides in Austin. It is the clearest near-term timeline yet for overnight unsupervised operation. Tesla’s paid Robotaxi network currently runs from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.
next month or so. the next tech to merge on the v15 plan will enable it.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) September 4, 2026
That 16-hour window is shorter than the 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. schedule the company used for much of the prior year.
Elluswamy did not name the specific feature or say whether the change would apply first to purpose-built Cybercabs, the existing Model Y fleet, or both. He also offered no city-by-city rollout list. The link to Full Self-Driving v15 is nevertheless significant.
Tesla has described v15 as a step-change architecture with seven parallel improvement tracks and roughly ten times more parameters than earlier builds. Early versions of that software already operate on the Robotaxi fleet and contain about 40 percent of the planned gains.
By July 2026, the unsupervised fleet had logged more than 380,000 miles across six cities in two states with what the company called an impeccable safety record and no notable incidents caused by the vehicles themselves. Tesla has repeatedly argued that camera-based end-to-end neural networks, rather than extra sensors, are the core of the solution.
Overnight service would test that claim in lower-light conditions and would also raise vehicle utilization, a key variable for Robotaxi unit economics. The company has already begun using public Superchargers at night and is building dedicated Robotaxi charging sites.
Riders have asked why software must change if the cars already drive in the dark. The practical answer appears to be reliability and scale: Tesla has held back mass expansion until more of the v15 stack is merged, citing the need for higher confidence before putting thousands of unoccupied vehicles on streets around the clock.
If the next module arrives on the timetable Elluswamy sketched, 24-hour service could begin in October 2026 in at least some markets.
That would mark a shift from a daytime-bounded pilot to a service that can run whenever demand exists, including the late-night hours that have so far remained out of reach.