What we now know about Tesla’s Austin robotaxi launch this year

Despite its tumultuous quarter, Tesla says it’s on track for its robotaxi launch in Austin this year. That means regular people will be able to pay money to ride in a self-driving fleet of Tesla-owned vehicles beginning in the “end of June or July,” CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s earnings call, where he offered a few more details about the project.

Earlier this year Musk had said June, but in the scheme of his timelines, July seems close enough. Back in 2019, Musk said the company would roll out a fleet of robotaxis “next year,” i.e., in 2020.

Musk now says the service will be available “in many other cities in the US by the end of this year.”

As with everything Tesla, take any promises and timelines with a grain of salt. Here’s what else we now know about Tesla’s robotaxi launch, according to Musk:

• The robotaxis are Model Ys, not Cybercabs. The vehicles consumers will be able to hail in Austin will be autonomous Model Ys, Musk said, but added that any of the “vast majority of the Tesla fleet” is capable of being a robotaxi, including models S, 3, X, or Y. The two-seat steering-wheel-less gold Cybercab that Musk trotted out last fall is still scheduled for production in 2026.

• The service will have “10 to 20 vehicles” at its start. “We’re still debating the exact number to start up on day 1, but it’s, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 20 vehicles on day 1,” Musk said. He added that the company plans to “scale it up rapidly after that” and that “there will be millions of Teslas operating autonomously in the second half of next year.” That’s around the same time Musk expects the program to “become material and affect the bottom line of the company.”

• It’s happening in Austin. While that might seem like an obvious point, having a ride-hailing service within a sunny, geofenced area where it’s been training for months is not the same as having unsupervised full self-driving in the wild across the US. Despite this, Musk said what the company is “solving for is a general solution to autonomy, not a city-specific solution for autonomy,” and that it would be a “very scalable thing for us to go broadly within whatever jurisdiction allows us to operate.”

• The cars will have remote operators. “We do have remote support, but it’s not going to be required for safe operation,” Musk said, downplaying the need for remote operators. “Every now and then if a car gets stuck or something, someone will like, unlock it.”

• Testing for autonomous full self-driving in Austin seems to be doing pretty well. Musk says the electric vehicle company is working through “unusual” edge case interventions. “These are really very rare, like a single intervention every 10,000 miles,” Musk said, adding that the company is burning lots of rubber to come across those in Austin. “There’s just always a convoy of Teslas going just going all over to Austin in circles.”

• Unsupervised FSD coming to your personal vehicle “before the end of this year.” Musk sees the transition from unsupervised full self-driving robotaxis to unsupervised full self-driving personal vehicles as an easy one, sharing that the cars are already driving themselves from the factory to the parking lots. We’d like to point out that that is not the same thing. The routes Tesla vehicles drive autonomously outside the factories are previously mapped, low-traffic, and short: 1.4 miles for the Model Y and 0.6 miles mostly in an underground tunnel for the Cybertruck in Texas.

• Musk thinks Tesla will trump Waymo. Despite the fact that Google-owned Waymo is already operating a self-driving ride-hailing service in Austin (and a few other cities), Musk estimates Tesla will have at least a “90-something percent” market share. “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” Musk said, adding that Waymo’s lidar-equipped cars are too few and too expensive. He also made a pretty good dad joke: “The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs way-mo money.”

When pressed for more details about the robotaxi rollout, Musk demurred.

“It’s only a couple of months away, so you can just see it for yourself in a couple of months in Austin,” he said.