Tesla Robotaxi Reaches San Antonio — and Engineers Are Floating Lasers to Keep Its Cameras Clean

Tesla launched unsupervised Robotaxi service in San Antonio on Monday, its eighth city, and on the same day expanded its Austin service area to roughly 443 square miles. The rollout keeps Tesla’s driverless push moving at a fast clip, with San Antonio joining Austin, Atlanta and other cities where paying passengers can already hail a Tesla with no one behind the wheel.

The same week brought a glimpse of how Tesla thinks about the robotaxi’s biggest weather problem: dirty cameras. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, floated the idea of using focused lasers to keep robotaxi cameras clear in a new episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, where he and design chief Franz von Holzhausen walked Leno through the Model Y L.

The laser idea revives one of Tesla’s stranger patents. The company filed for “Pulsed Laser Cleaning of Debris Accumulated on Glass Articles in Vehicles and Photovoltaic Assemblies” in May 2019, and the U.S. Patent Office granted it in September 2021. An updated divisional version was granted on March 31, 2026. Moravy gave no timeline, and he described the laser setup as something Tesla is considering rather than a confirmed feature.

The Model Y L at the centre of the episode launched in the U.S. in July at $61,990. For now the laser remains an idea, not a product — but it shows where Tesla’s engineering attention is going as the robotaxi fleet grows: the hard problems are no longer just driving, but keeping a driverless car’s eyes clean in rain, dust and road grime.