Tesla has reportedly raised concerns among national and California regulators by not fully informing them about its driverless ride-hailing rollout in the Bay Area.
The information was reported by Reuters on Monday, after seeing e-mails exchanged in late July between the California State Transportation Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Kareem Habib, a NHTSA investigator, asked California officials then if their team had met with Tesla to “discuss this weekend rollout” – referring to the expansion of the ride-hailing service to the Bay Area.
According to the Californian authority, Tesla did not have the required permits to launch the service as they did in Austin.
The EV maker had launched its service in Texas a month earlier, on an invitation-only basis.
Unlike the rides in Austin, which usually have a safety operator in the passenger seat, the California ride-hailing service places a safety monitor behind the wheel.
This has led several people to compare the service to other ride-hailing apps, where it is possible that the driver owns a Tesla and uses the company’s (Supervised) Full Self-Driving system.
Emily Warren, a state deputy transportation secretary, emailed Tesla‘s public-policy staffer Noelani Derrickson, expressing concern about public misconceptions regarding Tesla’s plans in the Bay Area.
Tesla had previously informed the California Public Utilities Commission that it planned rides for Tesla employees’ family and friends in non-autonomous vehicles.
Warren questioned Derrickson how information about a ‘robotaxi’ service in California had become public, suggesting it might have arisen from a misinterpretation of recent Tesla statements.
More recently, in an X post, Tesla wrote, “$99/mo to have your own supervised Robotaxi” — which implies a relation between the two, generating confusion in the public perception of both services.
‘Do you plan to publicly clarify the nature of Tesla‘s expanding Bay Area operations to clear up the confusion?’ Warren asked.
However, the public policy representative said only that “as a general policy, Tesla does not respond to press inquiries,” adding that customers would receive information about Tesla’s ride-hailing operations “when they become available.”
The California Public Utilities Commission, which oversees autonomous ride-hailing, said Tesla must “properly and accurately” describe its service and make sure its communications clearly distinguish between its human-driven operations in California and the autonomous ride-hailing services it offers in other locations.
Tesla has recently received permits to start testing operations of its Robotaxi service on public roads in both Nevada and Arizona.
The Office of Business Licensing from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved last week the company’s Testing Registry certification, according to Tesla enthusiast and shareholder Sawyer Merritt.
Over the weekend, ADOT’s Motor Vehicle Division confirmed it had acknowledged Tesla’s self-certification to test vehicles with safety operators — an information also shared by Merritt.
Earlier in July, during the company’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Elon Musk had already revealed that the company had requested permissions to operate in several states, including the two.
“We’re getting the regulatory permission to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, and a number of… Florida, a number of other places,” Musk had stated then.
Last month, Tesla was also spotted testing its Robotaxi in Miami, Florida, with no one inside the vehicle — not even the safety operator in the passenger side.
As the company expanded its geofenced area in Austin to include freeways, the operator must be present in the driver’s seat in every trip that includes those.
After some people compared the service to regular ride-hailing with a human driver using Tesla‘s Full Self-Driving (FSD), Elon Musk said last week that the safety driver will likely be removed by year-end.
“The safety driver is only needed for the first few months to be extra safe,” he wrote on X. “There should be no safety driver by the end of the year.”
Earlier this week, media outlet Politico reported that Tesla has started requesting approval from several California airports to allow its driverless ride-hailing service to pick up and drop off passengers there.
The public launch of the service is planned for later this month, with Tesla having launched the Robotaxi app on Apple Store already, as it aims for half of the US population to be able to use the service by the end of 2025.
