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.
Musk said on the call that public safety was Tesla’s top priority when rolling out the service, and pointed to new safety data Tesla published on Wednesday, which said there had been one crash for every 5.94 million miles driven in a Tesla using Autopilot technology—compared with one crash for every 1.08 million miles when Autopilot technology is not in use.
“The standard has to be very high, because the moment there’s any kind of accident with an autonomous car—this immediately gets worldwide headlines, even though about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the U.S., and most of them don’t even get a mention anywhere,” Musk said. “If somebody scrapes a shin with an autonomous car, it’s headline news.”
Musk said that he expects Tesla to be operating in “several cities” by the end of the year, and in 2026, Musk said he hoped people would be able to add their own Tesla vehicles to the fleet when they are out on vacation—akin to an “Airbnb inventory,” he said. (Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia sits on the board of directors at Tesla.)
“That’s probably next year, because we want to just make sure we’ve ironed out any kinks,” Musk said. He added: “It’s just a bunch of work that needs to be done to make sure the whole thing works efficiently—that people can order the car, it comes to the right spot, does exactly the right thing, all the payment systems work, the billing works,” he said.
