Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his company will start offering public rides in driverless vehicles in Austin, Texas, on June 22, which would mark the beginning of his long-promised robotaxi service.
That date could shift because Musk claimed Tesla is “being super paranoid about safety.” Tesla Model Y SUVs have been spotted in recent days and weeks being tested around Austin with no drivers in the seat. Bloomberg News previously reported that Tesla was eyeing a June 12 launch of the service.
Musk has spent years claiming Teslas would be able to drive themselves. In 2019, he claimed Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 2020 that would feature 1 million driverless vehicles. That never happened.
Instead, Tesla has spent the intervening years iterating on the software it calls Full Self-Driving (FSD), which requires drivers to pay attention to the road and be ready to take over at any time. That software is currently under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after it was allegedly involved in multiple crashes during low-visibility conditions, including one where a pedestrian was killed.
Musk has claimed Tesla has developed FSD to such a point that it will no longer need to be supervised. This new “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s FSD software is what’s powering the vehicles in Austin. And Musk claimed Tuesday that “every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised driving.”
Those claims come with caveats, though. The small fleet of vehicles — around 10 to start, according to Musk — will be geofenced to the “safest” areas of Austin, according to Musk. Teslas have also been spotted repeatedly running through one particular neighborhood in Southeast Austin, presumably gathering data to create a smoother experience.
That’s a big change in approach from how Musk spent years talking about FSD being a general-purpose self-driving solution that would work in any location without human supervision. Tesla’s process now more closely resembles how Waymo — which currently operates a commercial robotaxi business in multiple U.S. cities — rolls out its service in new locations.
Also, Musk’s claim about new Teslas being able to perform unsupervised driving represents a major change from his promise in 2016 that all of the company’s cars had the hardware required to become fully self-driving. That was not true. Tesla has gone through multiple versions of FSD hardware on its vehicles in the years since, and Musk admitted in January that millions of those cars would need an upgrade to run the current software. It’s unclear whether that kind of upgrade is even possible.
