Tesla plans to unleash robotic taxis onto the streets of Austin, Texas, this month. If the automaker can pull this off, it will be the culmination of a rocky, decade-long effort by the company to develop a car capable of driving itself.
Here’s what we know—and don’t know—about Tesla’s plans.
When Is Tesla Launching Robotaxis?
CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday said rides will start on June 22, while acknowledging that “the date could shift” since the company is “being super paranoid about safety.” That’s a much more concrete deadline than “next year,” which has typically been the refrain.
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What Will The Service Be Like?
Tesla plans to launch its own ride-hailing network rather than partnering with a company like Uber. It’s showed off mockups of what it will be like to order a ride via a mobile app, which may be Tesla’s existing app.
Preview of ride-hailing in the Tesla app
What Vehicles Will Tesla’s Service Use?
It’ll start with a fleet of around 10 Model Y crossovers, Musk told CNBC in a recent interview. That makes this more of a pilot than a full-scale deployment.
On Tuesday, Musk said on X that the Model Ys in the fleet are not modified with extra sensors or other hardware. This is a critical point. Tesla has promised customers for years that their personal cars were just one software update away from driving themselves.
“These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving!,” he said. He added that they are running a different self-driving software than Tesla’s other cars.
Tesla also plans to make something called the Cybercab, a purpose-built autonomous taxi without a steering wheel or pedals, but that isn’t ready yet. Eventually, the long-stated plan is also to allow any Tesla owner to add a personal vehicle to the robotaxi fleet and earn side income, like you might do with a spare room on Airbnb.
Musk, however, has been promising that for years, so especially take that one with a grain of salt.
Photo by: Tesla
Who Will Be Able To Use It?
The service will be invite-only at first, Morgan Stanley autos analyst Adam Jonas said in a recent note to clients. We’d expect it to be limited to Tesla employees—the company is based in Austin—and maybe some influencers close to the company.
Google’s Waymo has also taken this kind of gradual approach in the past, first offering access to employees and a small group of riders before expanding it to the general public.
Where Will Tesla Robotaxis Operate?
Musk told CNBC that the service will start in a limited area of Austin rather than the whole city. In the autonomous vehicle world, this is called “geofencing.” They’ll work in areas that the company deems “the safest,” he said. As an example, he said Tesla’s taxis will be programmed to navigate intersections that they can confidently handle, while avoiding others.
Photo by: Tesla
This is a big departure from the kind of self-driving system that Musk and Tesla have been promising all these years. He has touted Tesla’s “generalized” solution as one that can navigate in any environment without boundaries. That would set it apart from Waymo, the autonomous driving leader, which relies on meticulous maps of the cities it operates in.
Musk has tempered expectations on recent earnings calls and in interviews, saying that the company is being extremely cautious and taking things slow.
What Are Tesla’s Future Plans?
Musk has said the robotaxi service will start out small, with only a handful of vehicles in a small part of Austin, but expand quickly from there. Remember, he has made big declarations like this for around a decade, notably predicting in 2019 that by the following year Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the streets.
Musk told CNBC that he now expects Tesla to have hundreds of thousands of self-driving cars in its fleet by the end of next year. He has also said the service would rapidly expand to many cities across the U.S.
How Has Tesla Been Testing?
Tesla recently started testing driverless cars in Austin, Bloomberg reported and Musk later confirmed in an X post. A video of one popped up on social media for the first time on Tuesday.
We also know that Tesla has been conducting testing and data-gathering with safety drivers in the Austin area. On the city of Austin’s website, Tesla is listed as an autonomous vehicle operator in the “testing” phase.
Waymo, for its part, does extensive testing both with and without safety drivers before allowing the general public to ride in its vehicles in a new city. It started testing with a safety driver in Austin in mid-2023 and began driverless rides—only for employees—about a year later.
It’s not clear how long it will take for Tesla to move out of the pilot phase and start offering rides to regular people.
What We Don’t Know: A Lot
And that’s far from the only question looming over Tesla’s robotaxi launch.
Will it be limited to certain weather conditions or times of day? How much will it cost? What will be the role of the remote operators that Tesla has been hiring?
And the bigger ones: Can Tesla make a reliable self-driving system after all of these years? And, importantly, given all the backlash against Musk lately, will people actually use it?
Got a tip about the EV world? Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com
