In This Article:
It’s been three months since Tesla unveiled details of its much-anticipated robotaxi for the first time, and the electric automaker is already barreling forward with plans to launch a paid service.
On a Tesla earnings call Wednesday evening, Elon Musk told investors that the company is planning to start a paid autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin this June—far ahead of timelines analysts and industry insiders had thought was realistic.
“We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June,” Musk said on the call. He added: “We’ll be scrutinizing it very carefully to make sure there’s not something we missed.”
Tesla is moving quickly to try to play catch-up with its main competition. Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, has been operating on public streets in high-traffic urban areas for years and this past year began to rapidly scale up operations in new cities across America, conducting 4 million rides in 2024 alone.
But operating a robotaxi service is not for the faint of heart, as has been evidenced by the numerous players who have called it quits and exited the market, including General Motors, which said in December that it would shut down its Cruise autonomous driving subsidiary roughly one year after a high-profile accident in San Francisco. Uber and Ford dropped efforts and investments in autonomous ride-hailing several years ago—while Amazon’s Zoox has been conducting testing for years but has yet to launch a robotaxi service.
The robotaxi service Musk said will launch in June will likely be distinct from the purpose-built “Cybercab” vehicles that it touted at a splashy L.A. event in October. Tesla said at the time that it would aim to start manufacturing its Cybercab—which won’t have a steering wheel or pedals—sometime before 2027.
While many rival self-driving car companies rely on lidar laser sensors and detailed maps of roads and cities, Tesla has taken a “vision-only” approach that uses only video cameras and other types of sensors. That approach may allow it to scale faster than other companies.
“Obviously humans drive without shooting lasers out of their eyes,” Musk said on the call, when asked about Tesla’s thinking on the matter. He added: “The entire road system was designed for passive optical neural nets. That’s how the whole road system was designed, and what everyone is expecting … So therefore that is very obviously the solution for full self-driving.”
At the same time, Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving has raised eyebrows from regulators. The NHTSA is currently investigating Tesla’s full self-driving software after four collisions, including a fatal crash.