Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area for the past few months, Elon Musk said during the company’s earnings call Wednesday.
The company’s employees have been able to summon an autonomously operated Tesla vehicle for trips using the company’s prototype ride-hailing app, Musk said. The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel, ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong.
But Musk said the vehicles are operating autonomously using the latest version of the company’s Full Self-Driving software, which he said will be “1000 times better” than human driving by the second quarter of 2025. And he said he expects to roll out a paid ridehailing service in California and Texas starting next year, pending regulatory approval.
Tesla is not currently licensed to operate a commercial autonomous ridehailing service in California. Musk predicted it would be easier to obtain permission in Texas than California.
To be sure, the current iteration of FSD is a Level 2 driver assist system, which is not autonomous and requires constant human supervision. Musk has promised that FSD will become “unsupervised” next year, but his past predictions about autonomy have generally failed to come to fruition.
Still, the fact that Tesla has been testing its ridehailing function with employees proves the company is still dead set on eventually launching the long-promised Tesla Network. First announced in Musk’s Master Plan Part Deux, the Tesla Network claims to allow regular Tesla owners to send their vehicles out autonomously to function as robotaxis while their owners stay at home.
“This really is a profound change,” Musk said. “Tesla will become more than a vehicle and battery manufacturer company at that point.”
During the earnings call, Tesla executives described certain functions in the current Tesla app, like profile sharing and synchronizing setting across different vehicles, as laying the groundwork for an eventual robotaxi service.
The company first teased several screenshots of a ride-hailing function in its app earlier this year. The first screen shows a big button that says “Summon” with a lower message for the possible wait time. The next screen has a 3D map with a little virtual vehicle following a route to the waiting passenger. It looks a lot like the Uber app — but more Tesla-y.
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