Self-driving Teslas in the Vegas Loop: why the tunnels still have safety drivers

On paper, the Vegas Loop is the easiest place in the world for a Tesla to drive itself: narrow one-way tunnels, no pedestrians, no traffic lights and a handful of fixed routes. Yet years after the first promises, the Teslas that carry passengers under Las Vegas still have a person behind the wheel. Here is how the story has unfolded so far.

The timeline

• 2021: the Loop opens under the Las Vegas Convention Center with ordinary Teslas and human drivers.
• 2022: the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that The Boring Company expected self-driving Teslas in the Loop sometime in 2023. Steve Hill, head of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), said the plan was to switch cars to autonomous driving one at a time, with safety drivers staying on board until the cars were proven safe.
• Summer 2025: TechCrunch, citing Fortune, reported that Tesla's FSD (Supervised) had been tested in the tunnels for "a few months", with safety drivers who still had to take over from time to time. Hill said wider use was "a ways off".
• October 2025: Elon Musk posted that the Teslas in the tunnels would be driverless "in a month or two".
• Late 2025: the Loop began offering passengers rides in self-driving Teslas, but only between the convention center's Central Hall and the Encore resort, and with a safety driver who tells riders when a car is in self-driving mode. The SEMA car show was the first big convention where visitors could hail such a ride.

We found no announcement that the safety drivers have since been removed. The LVCVA's line has stayed cautious: Hill told the Review-Journal the system will be fully autonomous "when it is safe to do that", without giving a date.

Why tunnels are harder than they look

A closed tunnel removes many of the hardest parts of city driving, but it adds problems of its own. According to Hill, the Loop's colorful LED lighting and the semi-smooth tunnel walls confused the cameras at times, and some spots were difficult for the cars. Tesla relies on cameras only, without radar or lidar, so lighting and reflections matter.

The trickiest part may not be the tunnel itself but the stations, where cars have to pick up and drop off passengers in tight spaces with people walking around. Several Loop stations are also at street level, which brings surface traffic back into the picture.

The Tesla link

Every Loop vehicle is a Tesla, and the self-driving software being tested is the same FSD (Supervised) that Tesla sells to owners and builds its Robotaxi service on. That makes the Loop a public, small-scale test of Tesla's software in an unusual setting, and a showcase for both companies.

For The Boring Company, removing drivers matters for the business model: drivers are a large part of the cost of every ride, and the planned network is far bigger than today's, with a long-term goal of about 68 miles (around 110 km) of tunnels and 104 stations. Running hundreds of cars without drivers would change the economics of every station.

Why it matters

The Loop is a useful reality check on self-driving timelines. Even in a controlled environment, with one company digging the tunnels and a closely linked company writing the software, the step from "self-driving with a safety driver" to "no one in the front seat" has taken years. That is worth remembering when new deadlines are announced, for the tunnels or for public roads.

What to watch next

Signs that self-driving rides expand beyond the Central Hall to Encore route, any announcement that a station pair runs without safety drivers, and whether the new tunnels being built toward Westgate, Paradise Road and the airport open with drivers or with Tesla's software in charge.