Tesla's Robotaxi service in Austin now runs an hour later, closing at 11 p.m. instead of 10 p.m. Elon Musk announced the change on X on October 3. In the same breath, he admitted why the fleet hasn't gone fully nocturnal yet.

The holdup isn't weather or traffic. It's pets, specifically the ones cameras struggle to spot once the sun goes down and contrast disappears into the asphalt.

Musk stated the issue bluntly: "The main thing we are trying to solve is making sure that we do not run over pets when they are hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark," he wrote.

Cameras need light and contrast to separate an object from its background. A gray animal against gray pavement under weak streetlighting gives a vision system almost nothing to work with. Tesla's own vehicle manuals reportedly warn that dim or poorly lit roads can degrade what the cameras capture.

Musk has pushed back against the idea that LiDAR would fix this. He called it "a fool's errand" back in 2019, insisting "anyone relying on lidar is doomed." This week he relied on a different claim instead: "Cameras in the visible spectrum can see very well in the dark when the AI is doing the photon count." That line describes what he thinks the software could achieve under ideal conditions rather than how the Austin fleet is actually running now.

Waymo took the opposite bet. Its sixth-generation system pairs 13 cameras with four LiDAR units and six radars across a commercial fleet that now exceeds 4,000 driverless vehicles.

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