Elon Musk said he hopes to launch a service that will allow people to hail self-driving Tesla vehicles in California and Texas sometime in 2025, and says his company has already been testing the service in the Bay Area with employees.
The comments, made Wednesday on Tesla's third-quarter earnings conference call, go beyond what Musk promised two weeks ago at his Cybercab keynote event. In that At this stage, Musk promised that owners of the Mannequin 3 and Mannequin Y would be able to use an “unsupervised” version of Tesla's full self-driving software in California and Texas. But he didn't mention the ride-sharing network, even though Tesla had hinted at the idea for years.
It's unclear whether Tesla would need to get permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to conduct the testing that Musk said his company is already conducting. The DMV did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
David Lau, Tesla's vice president of software engineering, said on the call that the cars employees have been calling in had safety drivers behind the wheel. And to be clear, no Tesla vehicle can currently drive itself without human intervention.
Today, Tesla's full self-driving software, or FSD, is considered an advanced driver assistance system, not a self-driving system like the one Waymo uses in its robotaxis. FSD offers some automated features that are available on highways and city streets; However, the system still requires the driver to pay attention and take control.
Musk said on the call that Tesla would go through the proper regulatory approval process in California before opening such a service to ordinary consumers, although he lamented the bureaucracy and said he hopes for a smoother process in his home state of Texas. The regulatory process in California to launch a commercial robotaxi service has multiple levels requiring approval from the DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission. Waymo is the only company currently permitted to operate a commercial driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco.
Musk also opined that Tesla could also launch the service in other states by the end of next year.
These claims come after years of Musk overpromising about Tesla's ability to develop software that can drive cars autonomously. He originally promised in 2016 in a since-deleted post on Tesla's website that “All Tesla cars produced now have self-driving {hardware}” and in the years since made it seem like it would only take the flip of a switch to fill up. the streets with driverless cars.
Even the {hardware} part of that promise has not been fulfilled.
Tesla has had to update cars with those early versions of so-called “fully autonomous driving” {hardware}. And Musk admitted on Wednesday's call that cars equipped with what Tesla calls “{Hardware} 3,” which it began incorporating into its electric vehicles in 2019, may ultimately not be able to drive themselves. If Tesla ever gets to the point where its software can drive vehicles unattended and doesn't work on Hardware 3, Musk has promised to change that hardware at no cost to owners.
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