There are many challenges to putting self-driving cars on the road. Elon Musk says one of them has nine lives.
The Tesla CEO announced on Saturday that the company is expanding the operating hours of its robotaxis from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. in Austin and said that his team has been trying to overcome a rather stealthy problem.
“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,” Musk wrote in an X post. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
After years of delays, Tesla’s robotaxis were rolled out in Austin last year. Since then, the company has gradually expanded the availability there and in other Texas cities and in Florida.
Cybercabs use “camera vision and sensors” to navigate, according to Tesla. In its vehicle manuals, Tesla says that low or limited light — including unlit or poorly lit roads at night — can limit a camera’s ability to provide accurate visual information.
Cats and dogs, which are prone to darting unpredictably into the street, could pose a higher risk than the relatively routine flow of traffic.
In a reply to a comment on his X post on Saturday, Musk pointed to AI-assisted camera processing as a way to improve nighttime visibility.
“Visual spectrum cameras can see very well in the dark when AI is doing the photon count analysis,” he said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Telsa’s camera system for full self-driving vehicles and whether it’s good enough at spotting road hazards in less-than-ideal visibility conditions.
The robotaxi industry leader, Waymo, uses a different system than Tesla — LiDAR, which uses laser beams to scan the environment. One late night last year, a Waymo struck and killed a 9-year-old tabby cat named KitKat — prompting an outpouring of tributes from residents in the neighborhood.
In September 2025, a Tesla Model Y operating in its Austin robotaxi service struck a dog that ran into the street, the company reported. The report, which Tesla filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said the dog ran away from the car, apparently uninjured.
Musk has owned cats, including one named Schrödinger, after a physicist’s famous feline-based thought experiment. Musk once said he “tried liking” Schrödinger, but “the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. Not even slightly.”
“One day she disappeared,” he said.
