The first ever Tesla Model Y robotaxi with no one in the driver’s seat was spotted testing on public roads in Austin, Texas, on Sunday.
The company is scheduled to begin offering fully driverless rides on June 22 but the date could still change, Musk said on X.
A short video showed the SUV gliding through city traffic with both front seats empty. Chief executive Elon Musk reposted the clip on X, calling it a “Beautifully simple design.”
In a series of posts, Musk insisted that “These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving!”
He argued that “Tesla AI/Autopilot could probably beat the best human around a track already. Eventually, it really won’t be a contest at all. Human reflexes cannot match machines.”
Musk said “the streets will change very rapidly” adding that “autonomous cars will be very common throughout the world in 2 to 3 years.”
Turning to competitors, Musk wrote that “The automakers keep being told that this isn’t real or that just buying some hardware from Nvidia will solve it. As Tesla robotaxis become widespread and their other solutions don’t work, they will naturally turn to us.”
Asked by users about software versions, he answered that it is “a new version of software” that “will merge to main branch soon.”
He added, “We have a more advanced model in alpha stage that has ~4X the params, but still requires a lot of polishing. That’s probably ready for deploy in a few months.”
In a separate post he said a “~4.5X increase in params should be ready for wide release later this year. Super frugal use of memory bandwidth, caching exactly what is needed & squeezing microseconds out of everything are needed to maintain the frame rate. And the whole system needs to be retrained.”
Musk first disclosed the Austin trials in late May, writing that “For the past several days, Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in the driver’s seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents,” and noting that the milestone came “a month ahead of schedule.”
He also promised that Tesla will roll out its inaugural “self-delivery” service in June, allowing new vehicles to drive themselves directly from the factory to customers without a pickup appointment.
At Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk was asked how the company’s upcoming robotaxi service would compare to Alphabet’s Waymo, one of its main U.S. rivals.
In response, Musk joked: “The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs way-mo [way more] money,” before contrasting vehicle production costs between the two companies.
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.
