Tesla’s driverless robotaxi has been spotted in Austin for the first time, but it is being followed by a trailing car with a driver.

CEO Elon Musk now says that Tesla aims to “tentatively” start its service on June 22.

Tesla now plans to operate its own small internal fleet of vehicles with dedicated software optimized for a geo-fenced area of Austin and supported by “plenty of teleoperation.”

The company has been discussing the launch of its paid service in June, but as we reported, it only officially began the “testing” phase earlier this week, according to Austin’s official website.

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Musk admitted that Tesla only started testing the system without safety drivers at the end of May.

In comparison, Waymo tested its system, which was already in operation driverless in other cities, for 6 months with safety drivers and 6 months without safety drivers before launching its service in Austin earlier this year.

Now, a Tesla Model Y without a driver was spotted in Austin for the first time:

Porsche is preparing to release its Cayenne EV in the next year or so, but that didn’t stop it from taking the car out in secret to a hillclimb meet, where it utterly destroyed the previous course record previously held by a 12-cylinder Bentley Bentayga.

Hillclimbing is a specialized sort of racing where cars start at the bottom of a hill and then race to the top of it. And it’s a type of racing where electric cars do quite well because of their high amounts of instant torque and fast low-end acceleration.

We’ve covered some other hillclimbs before, such as the famous Pike’s Peak hillclimb, where EVs shattered records last year, and where Ford is running an unrecognizably modified Mach-E this year in just a couple weeks. EVs do well here due to the race’s high altitude, which leads to inefficient combustion from gas-powered cars due to low oxygen in the air, which EVs don’t have to worry about.

And hillclimbing is popular in the UK, where courses are much shorter than the brutal 12.42-mile “race to the clouds” at Pike’s Peak. Most UK courses are more like a mile long, give or take.

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One of the most famous in the UK is Goodwood hill climb where an electric “fan car” holds the overall course record and where Ford competed (and won) with its ridiculous 1,400hp electric van.

Another course, part of the British Hill Climb Championship, is Shelsley Walsh, where this last weekend’s news happened. The race was first contested in 1905, with a length of 1,000 yards (910m, .57mi).

So, it’s just a sprint, and it’s a sprint that a Cayenne EV just absolutely destroyed every other car in its class on – even though the car isn’t out yet. It’s expected to get a full unveil later this year, but that didn’t stop Porsche from flexing its muscles ahead of release.

Porsche took a prototype version of its upcoming EV out to Shelsley Walsh, where it was looking to beat a record previously set by the Bentley Bentayga W12, an absolutely bonkers ultra-luxe SUV with a massive 12 cylinder, 6 liter twin-turbo engine capable of producing 600hp.

But that gigantic engine proved to be no challenge for the Cayenne, which crushed the antiquated dino-burner’s record by several seconds.

On such a short lap, records are often set by tenths or hundreds of a second, but the Cayenne EV beat the Bentayga’s 35.53 second record by more than four whole seconds, setting a new time of 31.28. Watch it below (the Cayenne EV’s part starts at 2:36:30, if the deep-link doesnt work):

(*Porsche told us those engine sounds are from another vehicle near the microphone, not from the Cayenne EV itself)

In the video, the Cayenne is extremely well behaved up the course, exhibiting very little body roll for such a large vehicle. This is owing to the low center of gravity characteristic of many EVs, due to the weight of the car being in the battery at the bottom of the vehicle, and to Porsche’s active suspension.

And on such a short run, the instant acceleration of the Porsche gave it a lasting advantage over the hulking Bentayga W12, allowing it to crush the previous record.

The Cayenne EV was driven by Gabriela Jilkova, Porsche’s development driver for its Formula E team. It even beat the production electric car record which was previously held by another Porsche, the Taycan Turbo. That record was 31.43 seconds, so the Cayenne was just able to pip it.

It isn’t, however, the fastest electric vehicle up the hill – that’s currently a 30.46, set in 2018 by Mitch Evans in a Jaguar Formula E car (from an earlier generation – surely the new Gen 3 EVO cars would be even quicker).

As of now, we still have no final numbers on what sort of specs the Porsche Cayenne will have, as the vehicle is still in prototype form and hasn’t gone through homologation. So, Porsche is still figuring it out like the rest of us, but from these results, it looks like they’ve got something good on their hands.

Electrek’s Take

Now this is just one race, and not a particularly famously-contested one. There are surely cars that haven’t run this hill that would beat the Cayenne up it. But 4 seconds is a huge record on such a short course, and is certainly a shot across the bow, such that we can’t wait to see where else Porsche takes this thing and what other gas SUVs it might be able to embarrass.

When I reviewed the 576-hp Macan EV Turbo, I found it to be absurdly, unnecessarily quick.

It also handled very well for a large vehicle (and it is indeed large – almost twice the weight of my own EV, a Tesla Roadster). An SUV is still not a sportscar, but I had no particular misgivings when driving it… except perhaps that maybe it was too powerful, and that I preferred the 4S since I just never knew when I would need the amount of power the Turbo could put down.

So I’m not surprised that its bigger sibling, the Cayenne EV, would also perform extremely well here. Porsche knows how to make a car and how to make it perform well, and somehow they’ve even brought that magic to a vehicle as big as the Cayenne EV.

So, I’m looking forward to a time that I get to bring the Cayenne EV to a Porsche meetup, just like I did with the Macan, and have another dad tell his child “you wanna see the fastest car here? it’s that one.” And it’ll have the records to prove it.

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