Tesla’s promise of launching fully self-driving cars is a decade old, but so far its vehicles have always required constant driver supervision. But CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that the automaker’s first true “unsupervised” self-driving system will be launched in June, starting in Austin as a paid service.
“Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them, in June in Austin,” Musk said during Wednesday night’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call. “This is not some far-off mythical situation, it’s five, six months away.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Teslas currently on the road are getting this capability through a software update, or if it would be launching a Waymo-like robotaxi service. But Tesla says the main impediment to the rollout is an abundance of caution.
Musk has previously said that Tesla’s ride-hailing service would start in California and Texas in 2025, and that it would begin with existing Tesla vehicles rather than purpose-built Cybercabs. So it wouldn’t be too surprising if the rollout started in Austin, with a pilot program of fully autonomous Teslas. But key to Tesla’s advantage, Musk says, is that its system will not require extensive mapping or expensive sensor suites to work. Waymo, the widely accepted leader in current autonomous technology, has expanded slowly in part due to its need for high-fidelity maps and intense beta testing in each new city where it operates.
“Our solution is a generalized AI solution, it does not require high-precision maps of a locality,” Musk said on the call. “So we just want to be cautious. It’s not that it doesn’t work beyond Austin. In fact, it does. We just want to be—put a toe in the water, make sure everything is okay.”
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But it’s crucial to note that while Tesla and other companies in Musk’s orbit are investing very heavily into AI, the company’s thesis for automated driving remains extremely unproven—and proof as to how exactly it’s advancing wasn’t a part of Wednesday evening’s call. Many competitors in the AI space and critics have insisted that camera and AI-based full autonomy may never be possible, at least on the current technological trajectory. Musk even confirmed on the call that he believes Lidar to be a “fool’s errand,” as he has before; “We even have a radar in the car and we turned it off,” he said. “Obviously, humans drive without lasers shooting out of their eyes.”
Musk went on to say that he expects the rollout to reach other areas this year. But it is crucial to remember that Musk’s predictions around “Full Self-Driving” have been extraordinarily optimistic. The CEO first said that full autonomy was just around the corner nearly a decade ago, and has continuously said the rollout would happen “this year” or “next year.” It wasn’t too long ago that 2024 was the target, and now it’s 2025, and the rollout is once again around the corner.
Yet the June target is as specific as he’s ever been. And at this point, trialing a driverless autonomous ride-hailing service isn’t even an unproven strategy. Waymo and Cruise have both pulled it off, albeit with pricier hardware. Tesla’s rollout will no doubt be more cavalier, and likely faster, but there’s no real reason to think the company can’t get a trial program operational this year.
All eyes will be on Tesla to see if it can deliver software that allows private EVs to drive fully autonomously without major restrictions. That’s been the ultimate goal since around 2016, and despite the goalposts moving countless times, still seems to be the plan.
The question, as ever, is when—and if—Tesla will finally deliver.
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Mack Hogan contributed to this story.
