Tesla Self-Driving Taxis Launching in Austin in JuneTesla Self-Driving Taxis Launching in Austin in June

Tesla will launch a commercial ride-hailing self-driving taxi service in Austin in June, according to Elon Musk. 

The CEO, no stranger to making dramatic, but thus far largely unfulfilled, claims regarding his company’s autonomous driving ambitions, made his latest pledge in an earnings call to discuss Tesla’s financial results in the final quarter of 2024.

“We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June,” Musk said. “We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised full self-driving at our factory in Fremont, and we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas.”

He continued: “It’s pretty cool. These Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin. So, what I’m saying is this is not some far-off mythical situation. It’s literally five, six months away, five months away kind of thing.”

While Tesla has failed to deliver on Musk’s predictions in the past, launching in Austin in June would adhere to the timeline he proposed on an earnings call last year.

Arguably, more interesting is his assertion that the unsupervised version of its Full Self Driving software – which, of course, still has to get regulatory approval – will initially be available as a “paid service.”

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This is notably different from the idea that unsupervised FSD will be available to customers on their own cars (should they subscribe to the tech), which is the scenario Tesla has endlessly promoted over the past few years.

Instead, Musk explained: “It will be our fleet testing it. That’s our sort of toe in the water.” What this means exactly is, as is often the case with Tesla, open for debate, but would seem to point to the sort of commercial robotaxi service that Waymo is already operating in the city and elsewhere. However, Musk did add: “Our sort of solution is a generalized AI solution… it does not require high precision maps of locality,” which obviously differs from the Waymo approach.

Beyond June, Musk claimed unsupervised FSD would be rolled out “as shortly as possible, [in] other cities in America.”

This, presumably, would come in the form of similar self-driving taxi services, as Musk continued: “I expect us to be operating unsupervised activity with our internal fleet in several cities by the end of the year.”

2026, he went on to say, would be when private Tesla owners would get access to unsupervised FSD for their own vehicles and be “able to add or subtract their car from the [Tesla robotaxi] fleet… kind of like Airbnb.”

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Whether all – or indeed any – of this comes to pass remains to be seen, and there is also the question of exactly how much autonomy unsupervised FSD will actually deliver. However, there seems to be no question that the public appetite for self-driving Teslas is strong.

At the time of writing, a video published on Musk’s X platform to demonstrate the cars’ capability to drive themselves at Tesla’s Fremont manufacturing facility has been viewed nearly 50 million times.

Away from the robotaxi chat on the earnings call, the financials revealed Tesla reported $25.71 billion in revenue for Q4, below analysts’ predictions of $27.26 billion.