Tesla robotaxis could be on the road in Autin, Texas, as early as June, CEO Elon Musk said in an earnings call on Wednesday.
“We’re going to be launching unsupervised Full Self Driving [FSD] as a paid service in Austin in June,” Musk said.
“This is not some far-off mythical situation,” he added. “It’s literally [a] five-months-away kind of thing.” That said, “we just want to be cautious…put a toe in the water, [and] make sure everything is okay, then put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water with safety of the general public and those in the car as our top priority.”
Thousands of Teslas “with no one in them” are currently being tested at the Fremont, California, factory, Musk added. Earlier this week, Tesla shared a video of some of these cars driving themselves to a designated loading dock.
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Last fall, Tesla previewed its Cybercab and Robovan robotaxis. At the time, Musk said Tesla would start unsupervised FSD in Texas and California in 2025 for its Model 3 and Model Y EVs. However, the Cybercab and Robovan aren’t expected to start production until 2026 or 2027.
Musk says he’s “confident that we’ll release unsupervised FSD in California this year,” followed by “many regions of…the US by the end of this year.” However, as Electrek notes, Tesla has made these types of promises for almost a decade, and Musk alluded to that in his remarks.
Tesla Cybercab prototype (Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Some of these things I’ve said for quite a long time,” he admitted. “I know people said, ‘well, Elon is the boy who cried wolf,’ like several times, but I’m telling you, there’s a damn wolf this time, and you can drive it. In fact, it can drive you. It’s a self-driving wolf.”
When asked by an analyst if the Austin robotaxi service would use Tesla-owned vehicles or allow Tesla owners in the region to rent out their cars, Musk said, “It’ll be our fleet testing it” at first. “I expect us to be…doing unsupervised activity with our internal fleet in several cities by the end of the year.”
By next year, however, Tesla may add privately owned EVs to the service. “Kind of like Airbnb where you can…add or subtract your house or your guest room,” you could rent out your Tesla at convenient times. “That’s probably next year because we want to just make sure we’ve ironed out any kinks,” Musk said.
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Rival robotaxi services have faced safety challenges; GM pulled its funding for Cruise, effectively killing the service. Musk said Tesla is “looking for a safety level that is significantly above the average human driver,” partly because all eyes are on self-driving cars.
“The standard has to be very high because the moment there’s an accident with an autonomous car, this immediately gets worldwide headlines, even though about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US and…most of them don’t even get a mention anywhere,” he said. “But if somebody scrapes a shin with an autonomous car, it’s a headline.”
Waymo already runs commercial robotaxis in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and it plans to launch the service in Atlanta, Austin, and Miami, and test it in 10 other locations this year.
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