Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his company will begin offering public vehicles on driverless vehicles in Austin, Texas on June 22, marking the beginning of his long-standing Robotaxi service.
The date could change as Mask claimed Tesla was “ultra paranoid about safety.” The Tesla Model Y SUV has been discovered in recent days and weeks being tested around Austin, with no drivers in the seats. Bloomberg News previously reported that Tesla is paying attention to launching its service on June 12th.
Musk has spent years claiming Teslas can drive himself. In 2019, he claimed that Tesla would launch a Robotaxi service in 2020, featuring one million unmanned vehicles. It never happened.
Instead, Tesla has spent years repeating software called Fully Autonomous Driving (FSD). The software is currently under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which allegedly involved in multiple collisions with low visibility, including conditions in which pedestrians were killed.
Musk claims that Tesla developed the FSD to a point where it would no longer have to be overseen. This new “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s FSD software is what powers Austin vehicles. And Musk claimed Tuesday that “every Tesla coming out of our factory is possible to operate unsupervised.”
However, these claims come with warnings. According to Musk, the vehicle fleet, which has been around ten times from the start, will be geofienated into the “safeest” area of Austin, according to Musk. Teslas has also been found repeatedly running through certain neighborhoods in southeast Austin, and is gathering data to create a more smoother experience.
This is a major change in approach from the way Musk has discussed over the years about FSD being a general purpose autonomous driving solution that works everywhere without human supervision. Tesla’s process is much more similar to how Waymo, which currently runs a commercial robotax business in multiple US cities, is deploying services in new locations.
Musk’s claim that the new Teslas could drive unsupervised represents a major shift from his promise in 2016 that all cars had the hardware needed to drive fully self-driving. That was not true. Tesla has since passed multiple versions of FSD hardware on the vehicle in several years, and in January Musk confirmed that millions of these cars need an upgrade to run current software. It is unclear whether such an upgrade is possible.