Christian Pfister, a 68-year-old retiree, walks his Great Pyrenees, Wally, each morning on the street in his quiet neighborhood—a compilation of old oak tree-lined streets for single-family homes, duplexes, and apartments in southeast Austin where he’s been living the last 26 years. It was about three weeks ago, on one of these morning strolls, that he spotted a white Tesla Y with a Texas manufacturer plate drive by, with a dark-colored Tesla closely trailing behind it.
He watched as the Tesla tandem conducted a left turn at a street up ahead of him, disappeared around the block for half a mile, then drove by him again—once, then twice, then again and again.
“That’s all they did—around the same block over and over and over, all day long,” Pfister says in an interview.
Since Pfister’s spotting of the vehicles a few weeks ago, a handful of white Teslas (and some black and gray Teslas too) have frequented the streets of Pfister’s small neighborhood, driving the same routes and taking the same turns repeatedly—typically with drivers in the front seat, though two residents in the neighborhood that Fortune interviewed say they have seen some driverless vehicles with someone in the passenger seat. Another resident saw Teslas without anyone in them at all on multiple occasions.
