Tesla’s Q4 earnings call prompted CEO Elon Musk to make a bold announcement. As covered by Elektrek, Tesla plans to soon launch an unsupervised self-driving service on the streets of Austin, Texas, following in the footsteps of companies like Waymo and Cruise.
Tesla has been working on autonomous driving technology for over a decade now. As it stands, the company’s offerings have remained firmly at Level 2 on the SAE scale. Drivers have been required to maintain attention while using Tesla’s Autopilot and so-called “Full Self Driving” systems.
In June this year, however, Tesla believes it can launch a robotaxi service that will run fully autonomously. There will apparently be no safety drivers in the front seat on standby—the service will be “unsupervised, no one in the car,” according to Musk.
It’s not the first we’ve heard of this plan; Tesla was already feeling out city officials late last year on establishing the operation. Tesla will run a fleet of driverless vehicles in Austin, offering trips to paying customers. Beyond that, the hope is to expand to other locales down the line. “I predict Tesla will launch unsupervised FSD in California later this year, as well as in mnay other regions of the US,” stated Musk in the Tesla earnings call.
While the company made big waves with the announcement of its two-door ‘Cybercab’ last year, that vehicle isn’t slated to enter production until 2026. Assuming the dedicated cab is not yet available, Tesla will likely instead use its existing models to run the robotaxi service.
To that end, the company has shown off newly-built vehicles using their self-driving technology to navigate themselves around the company’s Fremont factory prior to shipment. Of course, driving around a factory lot is a lot simpler than driving on public roads, but it shows a certain level of trust in the autonomous driving system nonetheless. Notably, though, Teslas aren’t driving themselves off the line at the Giga Texas plant just yet, suggesting the system isn’t generally capable of handling just any environment.
Teslas now drive themselves from their birthplace at the factory to their designated loading dock lanes without human intervention
One step closer to large-scale unsupervised FSD pic.twitter.com/Aj6dHsLaRO
— Tesla AI (@Tesla_AI) January 29, 2025
While Musk has always claimed that full autonomy is on the cards for Tesla, several deadlines have blown by over the years. Indeed, the Tesla CEO claimed back in 2016 that the company’s cars already had the hardware on-board to achieve this feat. Still, the capability is still yet to show up in the company’s vehicles, and Musk said today that hardware upgrades would be necessary. There is no word as yet to when existing Tesla owners can expect higher levels of autonomy to reach their vehicles. For now, Tesla’s driving assists remain at Level 2—requiring eyes on the road during operation.
In the past, Tesla has also highlighted the possibility of individual owners letting their vehicles act as taxis while not in their personal use. However, at this stage, it looks like Tesla will solely be operating its own fleet of vehicles. Such a scheme would likely be years away, if it happens at all.
Whether Tesla has the technology to run fully autonomous robotaxis remains to be seen. Earlier this year, Elektrek reported on a crowdsourced statistical analysis of the company’s FSD v13 system. It suggests the company’s full-self-driving technology achieves maybe 493 miles between disengagements, where a human must take over. That’s not very much, in the grand scheme of things, and likely not good enough to run robotaxis in public without safety drivers behind the wheel. Regardless, we can’t speak as to the level of sophistication Tesla has reached internally. The company may have more capable autonomous driving technology that is yet to be released to the public that would perform at a higher level.
If Tesla can run fully autonomous cars without drivers inside, it would make perfect sense to start putting that capability to good use. It would be the perfect advertising for its vehicles when the technology trickles down to publicly available models, and could show that the sensor-heavy Waymo approach to self-driving is perhaps not necesssary. However, it’s a big if. Whether Tesla can actually pull it off remains to be seen.
Image credits: Tesla
I’m looking forward to this and I really hope that Musk or someone else can finally pull it off. If it happens, it’ll be a Godsend for handicapped people and even children. And for us regular folk? I wonder if we can have a few drinks if the car does all the driving? I wonder if you’ll be able to program a destination, then send off the car, empty, to pick up your groceries while you are at work? Old people (me) who have difficulties driving, this will open up the world for them.
I look forward to someone pulling this off correctly. If it’s Musk, ugh, fine.
I doubt it will be.
He’ll think of it as a triumph if it only kills a few people a year.
Austin is the perfect place for this. The tech types there will happily be early adopters/alpha testers, and if it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Musk’s ties to state government will give Tesla a pass on any liability and the gerrymandered, mostly Democratic electorate there wouldn’t have been voting for anyone currently in power anyway.
Yet another reason I am happy not to be living there anymore.
The header image is a great example of what a single occupancy (or less) vehicle is almost seemingly designed to do – be traffic.
Hahahahahahahaha hahahahahaha!
Good one.
Please STOP with the aerodynamic weirdness! For vehicles that will primarily travel under 40mph or so, it doesn’t even matter much at all. Build larger cabins and more functional interiors. It would be a game changer.
Sincerely,
Tired of all the suppositories, plus that one kidney stone
I give it one day before one of these swasticars runs someone over.
Don’t wear deer costumes at night in Austin. This is your only warning.
Well there goes my weekend….
Assume this will be through their own app? I’d hate to order an Uber and have one of these show up.
I’ll still have to share the road with them when I go to Austin, unfortunately.
Going to definitely do full self driving. I mean seriously for real this time.
Will Texans smash these cabs like Californians do the Wamu cabs or will they just shoot them up?
They’ll be used as RTI ramps for brodozers.
Great minds think alike!
Yee-yee!
As an Austinite, I wonder how many lines of code it took for the bro-dozer avoidance protocol? I see a few good ole boys thinking their rig’ll roll over that car reeal nice.
Good point.
I read it as “how many lines of coke.”
Oddly it also makes sense.
Please. Texas lawmakers know what they have to kiss and how often. Muskrat is god.
Lawmakers yes, regular people, hell naw.
At least they’re starting in a safe, largely traffic free city like Austin
Austin is famous for being easy to navigate. Wide open roads, hardly any traffic, not a pedestrian in sight. Pretty good BBQ too.
And this year I plan to: Pay off all my loans, lose 30 pounds, meet the love of my life, buy a Miata, travel all over the country, get a promotion, change the world, become Time’s Person of the Year and win the Nobel Peace Prize.
I’ll let you guess which one I find more likely to happen.
Are we invited to your Nobel Prize afterparty?
Of course, it will be BYOB though, won’t be any money left in the budget after such a tremendously busy year.
But you’re getting a promotion!
Cheapskate!!! You get ~$1,000,000 for winning a Nobel Prize. Surely you can spare $100 for a keg and a couple of handles of Tito’s.
Whoa man, I don’t think $100 could even cover 2-3 handles of Titos much less a keg! But you know what, between the promotion and the Nobel Prize, I could probably budget for both.
Yeah, I don’t drink these days so my concept of liquor pricing is out of date.
So now that Austin has been fully ruined by douchebags, where will the weirdness go? Somewhere in Arizona? New Mexico?
I’m not saying, if this autonomous taxi bullshit happens, people should spray paint the cars into rolling anti-Nazi billboards that will patrol Austin 24/7 but I won’t be mad if it does happen.
In Texas, where everybody has a gun and is just itching to use it, empty cars driving themselves down the street are for riddling with bullets.
“But I wasn’t aiming at anyone!”
Hahahahahahahaha! Shit.
Between the article on here about ai recognition of emergency lights, and having recently watched what was touted as an ai race in Abu Dhabi, I believe I’ll give Austin a miss while this real-time beta testing is going on
Did not know about that race. After watching it, I’m confident I could have won the race and beaten all those AI cars 😀
It was pretty sad.
To be fair, the teams only had 2 months to program, so I blame the promoters
I can only guess how you would heil such a cab.
F Tesla and their Nazi owner.
[Nice use of unicode, but maybe let’s not]