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The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi network will have to wait.
On Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk made a tweet stating that, “tentatively,” the first public rides on its autonomous vehicles — which will not be in its purpose-built Cybercabs, but in regular Teslas with updated software — will start on June 22.
But the date could shift, Musk added, because “we are being super paranoid about safety.”
That comment could prove to be revealing.
Tesla’s robotaxi initiative is clouded with uncertainty, because the automaker has never released a driving system that’s capable of operating without a human behind the wheel.
Its most advanced system that it’s released to date, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), frequently requires driver intervention and poses serious safety concerns; it’s the subject of an ongoing federal investigation after a Tesla with the driving mode activated struck and killed an elderly pedestrian.
Musk’s update could also suggest that engineers are struggling behind the scenes to ensure the software is ready. While Musk never set a hard launch date in the past, previous reporting from Bloomberg said that Tesla was targeting a rollout on June 12 — today— after development was supposedly ahead of schedule. (Another report around the time suggested that it was in fact seriously behind schedule.) It should also go without saying that Musk has a history of giving impossibly optimistic timelines, including promising that Tesla would have one million robotaxis on roads “next year” — in 2019.
On Tuesday, before he provided the tentative date, Musk reshared footage that a bystander in Austin took showing one of Tesla’s robotaxis in action.
What viewers were treated to was not the long-awaited “Cybercab,” its two-seater car with no steering wheel designed to serve exclusively as an autonomous cab. Instead, it was a black Model Y with the word “Robotaxi” emblazoned on the side in a faux-graffiti font of questionable taste.
But lo and behold, as the car steered itself around a corner and patiently waited for a few pedestrians to finish crossing the street, there was no one sitting in the driver’s seat. Musk had previously stated in late May that the company had completed its first test of operating a driverless Robotaxi on a public road.
The robotaxi service will initially be limited to Tesla employees, with its roughly dozen or so cars geo-fenced to the city of Austin. It’s likely that to facilitate the launch, the automaker will be heavily relying on teleoperators, or employees who supervise the cars from a remote location, with the purpose of taking over the vehicles in an emergency. That’s something that all robotaxi companies depend on, but Tesla has kept suspiciously quiet about the extent of its teleoperations.
Nonetheless, Musk is insisting that the program will grow at a rate dwarfing anything ever achieved by its competitors, which already have years of a head-start and actually proven (though, of course, far from perfect) driving software. In an interview, the billionaire promulgated that over 1,000 Tesla robotaxis would be roaming the streets of Austin “within a few months” of launching. He even estimated that more than one million self-driving Teslas would be roaming the country by the end of 2026, once the robotaxi software is made available to Tesla’s customers.
Take all these claims with a grain of salt, however. Musk has basically gambled Tesla’s future on his robotaxi pivot, as the automaker’s sales plummet and its newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, continues to be an abysmal flop. Maybe more than ever, he has every reason to keep stringing along his investors and fans.
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