AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Tesla robotaxis are on their way to Austin in June, the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, confirmed — and there could be 1,000 of the vehicles on the streets within just a few months.
“We’ll start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40,” he said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. “It will probably be at 1,000 within a few months.” He’s previously said the ramp-up will be quick.
After the Austin rollout, Musk said he plans to expand the robotaxis to other cities, like San Francisco. By the end of 2026, Musk predicted there could be more than 1 million self-driving Teslas in the US.
In 2019, Musk said Tesla could have more than one million robotaxis by year’s end, but that deadline came and went with Musk admitting that punctuality is not his “strong suit.”
Texas and California, where autonomous Waymo cars are already on the road, have different regulations, and Tesla doesn’t have full approval to launch its robotaxis in the Golden State.
“The approval process is very haphazard and sort of state-by-state, and sometimes city-by-city,” Musk said. He said on Tuesday that it’s crucial to set up nationwide regulations for self-driving cars.
The initial robotaxi launch in Austin will be highly limited, as Musk said on an April 22 earnings call. Tesla told a Morgan Stanley analyst that the service will operate on public roads and be invite-only.
The company also said many teleoperators will be available to help out. In robotaxi-speak, teleoperators typically mean that a remote employee can take over some level of control, usually when the autonomous driver gets stuck. Competitors Waymo and Zoox handle those types of situations slightly differently. It’s not clear exactly how much control teleoperators will have during the Austin robotaxi launch.
Representatives from Tesla did not immediately respond to Business a request for comment from Business Insider.
Musk said during the interview that Tesla’s robotaxis will be geo-fenced to specific parts of the Austin region after CNBC’s David Faber pushed the CEO to respond to the outcome of Business Insider’s test between Waymo and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised software.
BI compared the companies’ two self-driving technologies, and the Tesla ran a red light at a complex intersection in San Francisco.
Musk said BI’s test “made no sense” but added that Tesla’s robotaxis will avoid certain areas of Austin if the company deems it unsafe.
“We will geo-fence it,” Musk said. “It’s not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident it’s going to do well with that intersection. Or it will just take a route around that intersection.”
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