Tesla is testing a robotaxi service that Elon Musk says will launch next year

Elon Musk has said he hopes to launch a service that will allow people to hail Tesla’s self-driving cars in California and Texas by 2025 — and says his company is already testing the service in the Bay Area with employees.

The comments, made Wednesday on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call, go beyond what Musk promised two weeks ago at the Cybercab launch event. Opened that on stage, Musk promised that Model 3 and Model Y owners will be able to use an “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software in California and Texas. But he didn’t mention a ride-hailing network, despite Tesla having teased the idea for years.

It is unclear whether Tesla will be required to obtain a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to conduct the tests that Musk said his company is conducting. The DMV did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

David Lau, Tesla’s Vice President of Software Engineering, said in a phone call that the cars that were driven by employees had safe drivers behind the wheel. And to be clear, none of Tesla’s cars can currently drive themselves without human intervention.

Today, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, or FSD, is considered an advanced driver assistance system — not a self-driving system like the one Waymo uses in its robots. FSD offers some automatic features available on highways and city roads, however the system still requires the driver to pay attention and control.

Musk said on the phone that Tesla will go through the proper approval process in California before opening such a service to everyday consumers, although he lamented the red tape and said he expected a smooth process in his home state of Texas. The regulatory process in California for introducing a commercial robot service has multiple stages that require approval from the DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission. Waymo is the only company currently allowed to operate a driverless robot service in San Francisco.

Musk also revealed that Tesla may start this service in other states by the end of next year.

The claims come after years of Musk’s overconfidence in Tesla’s ability to develop software that can make autonomous cars. He first promised in 2016 in a since-deleted post on Tesla’s website that “All Tesla Cars Now Produced Have Full Self-Driving Hardware,” and in subsequent years made it seem like it would only take the flip of a switch to fulfill it. roads with self-driving cars.

Even the hardware part of that promise has yet to be fulfilled.

Tesla had to develop the cars with the early version of the hardware called “Full Self-Driving” hardware. And Musk acknowledged Wednesday’s call that cars equipped with what Tesla calls “Hardware 3” — which it began building into its EVs in 2019 — may not be able to drive themselves. If one day Tesla gets to the point where its software can drive cars without supervision, and it doesn’t work on Hardware 3, Musk has promised to replace that hardware at no cost to owners.