Tesla will launch an “unsupervised, no one in the car” robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in June, Elon Musk said in an earnings call Wednesday.
“We just want to put a toe in the water, make sure everything’s okay, put a few more toes in the water, with safety of the general public and those in the car as a top priority,” Musk said.
The vehicles will be part of a fleet owned by Tesla, and not customer’s personal vehicles. (Musk has previously promised Tesla customers would be able to add their own vehicles to a “Tesla Network” for ridehailing.) They will be available for paid trips, and will arrive without anyone behind the wheel, Musk claimed.
Over the years, the Tesla CEO has caught a lot of flack for repeatedly promising that fully autonomous vehicles were just one to two years away — and then failing to deliver. Now, the timeline of Musk’s promise has been shorted significantly.
“This is not some far off, mythical situation,” Musk said. “It’s literally, you know, five six months away.”
In its letter to shareholders, Tesla said its customers have cumulatively driven over 3 billion miles on Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — the company’s advanced driver system — as of January. Tesla says that FSD (Supervised) is a precursor to fully autonomous vehicles, but the company warns customers that they need to continue to pay attention to the road since the system does not make the vehicle autonomous. The company also claims to have increased AI training compute by over 400 percent in 2024.
The company recently posted video of dozens of Model 3 and Model Y vehicles driving “without human intervention.” The vehicles have no human safety driver inside them as they are seen driving a 1.2 mile route on Tesla’s private, enclosed factory roads. Musk said that unsupervised Tesla vehicles will soon be operating similarly at its factory in Texas.
Bloomberg previously reported that Tesla was in conversation with Austin’s autonomous vehicle task force about launching a robotaxi service.
To be sure, Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving differs significantly from most other companies. The automaker only uses cameras to power its vehicle’s perception system, and does not utilize lidar as a redundant sensor. The company also releases selective safety statistics that have been criticized for lacking details. And FSD (Supervised) has many shortcomings. It struggles with basic perception issues, like wet roads and sunlight glare. FSD sometimes fails to recognize motorcyclists: a 28-year-old motorcycle owner was killed outside of Seattle earlier this year by a Model S driver who was using the driver-assist feature.
Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service with employees in the Bay Area since last year. The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel who ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong. Musk has said he expects to roll out a paid ridehailing service in California and Texas starting 2025, pending regulatory approval. Tesla is not currently licensed to operate a commercial autonomous ridehailing service in California.
In the call, Musk said he’s “confident” Tesla will release unsupervised FSD in California and additional parts of the US later this year. Musk revealed the company’s sleek Cybercab earlier last year, promising that it would go into production in 2026.