During Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, chief executive Elon Musk reiterated plans to launch fully autonomous paid ride services in June. The service will begin in Austin before expanding to “many other cities in the US by the end of this year.”
Musk said the service would initially operate with “maybe 10 or 20 vehicles on day one,” using the recently refreshed Model Ys rather than the company’s robotaxi, known as the Cybercab.
At its robotaxi launch event held last October, Tesla unveiled its Cybercab, a two-door model with no pedals nor steering wheel. The company said production of the model would start in 2026 and that the model would be priced below $30,000.
Last January, Musk announced at the previous earnings call that the first unsupervised self-driving rides would begin in Austin, in June.
“I talked to the team… 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,” he stated.
Last month, as the brand showcased the model to “critical operational stakeholders” from the Texas Department of Transportation, the goal was reaffirmed.
“The future is autonomous & it starts in Austin, this June Thanks to Austin City & Texas DOT for hosting & supporting our efforts to unlock safe & low-cost premium point-to-point electric transport,” Tesla wrote on X.
Rollout Plans
When asked on Tuesday by Deutsche Bank’s analyst Edison Yu “How many cars or how big the scale will be initially and how that might ramp up,” Musk stated that the service will start off with “maybe 10 or 20 vehicles on day one.”
The CEO said that the company plans to “scale it up rapidly after that,” but did not specify a ramp-up pace or timeline. However, Musk stated that by the “end of June or July,” anyone can “just go to Austin and order a Tesla for autonomous drive.”
“It’s very difficult to predict the exact ramp sort of week by week and month by month except that it will ramp up very quickly,” he had previously stated in the call.
Answering a separate question, Tesla‘s chief also announced that the full autonomous paid rides service will not feature the Cybercab model from the beginning, but “probably Model Ys.”
“The Teslas that will be fully autonomous in June in Austin are probably Model Ys. So, that is currently on track to be able to do paid rides fully autonomously in Austin in June,” he said, adding that they plan “to be in many other cities in the US by the end of this year.”
Cybercab Production
Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the Cybercab production would suffer delays, as the company’s “plans to ship components from China […] were suspended” due to the raised tariffs on imported Chinese goods.
According to the report, “Tesla was ready to absorb the additional costs when Trump imposed the 34% tariff on Chinese goods but could not do so when the tariff went beyond that, leaving shipping plans suspended.”
Earlier this week, X user Joe Tegtmeyer shared images of the Giga Texas facility appearing to show, for the first time, new vehicle castings marked “RTTX” — a label that may refer to “Robotaxi Texas” as Tesla begins early production of its first Cybercab units.
Travis Axelrod, Tesla‘s Head of Investor Relations, stated on the call that the company has their “first big [Cybercab] builds coming at the end of this quarter,” adding that “in the coming months, we start to large scale installation of all the equipment in Giga Texas still on schedule for production next year.”
Elon Musk stated on Tuesday’s earnings call that “probably around the middle of next year” the autonomous rides in Austin will “move the financial needle” and “go exponential from there.”
Tesla’s chief added in the call that “there will be millions of Teslas operating autonomously, fully autonomously in the second half of next year.”
