Elon Musk hopes to launch a service that would allow people to welcome self-driving Tesla cars in California and Texas around 2025, and has claimed that his company is already testing the service with employees in the Bay Area.
The comments, made during Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday, go further than what Musk promised at the CyberCap unveiling event two weeks ago. to that In the step, Musk promised that Model 3 and Model Y owners would be able to use an “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s fully self-driving software in California and Texas. But he made no mention of ride-hailing networks, even though Tesla has teased the idea for years.
It’s unclear whether Tesla would need permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to do the testing that Musk said his company is already conducting. The DMV did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
David Lau, Tesla’s vice president of software engineering, said on the call that the car that employees were cheering on had a safety driver behind the wheel. And to be clear, current Tesla vehicles cannot drive themselves without human intervention.
Today, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Software (FSD) is considered an advanced driver assistance system, not a self-driving system like the one Waymo uses in its robotaxi. Although FSD offers some automation features that can be used on highways and city streets, the system still requires driver attention and control.
Musk said on the call that Tesla would go through the proper regulatory approval process in California before rolling out these services to everyday consumers, but he lamented the bureaucracy and said he expected a smoother process in his home state of Texas. California’s regulatory process for launching commercial robotaxi services has several steps that require approval from the DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission. Waymo is currently the only company allowed to operate a commercial driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco.
Musk also said Tesla may launch the service in other states by the end of next year.
The claims come after years of Musk overpromising about Tesla’s ability to develop software that could drive self-driving cars. He originally promised in a now-deleted post on Tesla’s website in 2016 that “every Tesla car produced today will have fully self-driving hardware,” and in the years since, it has seemed like he could fill it with just the flip of a switch. Streets traveled by self-driving cars.
Even the hardware part of that promise is unproven.
Tesla had to upgrade its cars with an early version of so-called “fully self-driving” hardware. And Musk acknowledged on a call Wednesday that cars equipped with what he calls “Hardware 3,” which Tesla began building into its EVs in 2019, may ultimately not be able to drive themselves. If Tesla one day reaches a point where the software allows the vehicle to be driven without supervision and does not work on hardware 3, Musk has promised to replace that hardware at no cost to owners.
