Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja commented on Wednesday on the expansion of Tesla‘s robotaxi service, with CEO Elon Musk stepping back from the previous target of removing all safety operators by the year end.
Speaking at the company’s third quarter conference call, which followed the results, Taneja praised the expansion pace.
“We’ve already expanded our coverage area in Austin three times since the initial launch,” he said, noting that the company remains “on pace to continue expanding further.”
Taneja later noted that Tesla’s approach to autonomy differs from its competitors by integrating all required hardware into standard production vehicles rather than using specially equipped test fleets.
“Unlike our competitors, our robotaxi fleet blends in the markets we operate in,” he said. “Since they don’t have extra sensor sets or peripherals which make them stick out.”
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, responding to a shareholder question submitted through Say Technologies, said the company plans to remove safety drivers from its robotaxi fleet in parts of Austin “within a few months.”
Previously, the CEO had set the target of removing all safety operators by the year end.
Musk explained that Tesla is taking a conservative stance toward deployment given the potential public scrutiny surrounding autonomous driving.
“We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year,” the chief executive said.
“Obviously we’re being very cautious about the deployment, because even one accident will be front-page headline news worldwide. It’s better for us to take a cautious approach here,” Musk added.
The CEO said that Tesla expects to operate its robotaxi service in eight to ten metropolitan areas by the end of 2025.
“Within a few months we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin,” he said, calling that milestone “perhaps the most important data point.”
On the regulatory front, Musk said Tesla’s expansion timeline will depend on state-level approvals but noted that much of the documentation is already public.
“It depends on various regulatory approvals,” he said. “You can actually see most of our regulatory applications online, because they’re public information. But we expect to be operating in Nevada and Florida and Arizona by the end of the year.”
Just last week, Tesla listed a new job posting for Vehicle Operators in Colorado, marking the seventh state where it is expected to launch the service — after Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada and Arizona.
Starting in July, the service broadened its geofenced coverage and relaxed both passenger and age restrictions.
When it started operating in California, Tesla introduced an operator behind the wheel — contrary to Austin, where they sit on the passenger’s seat.
And as it expanded to Austin freeways, the same rule applied, with the operator remaining in the passenger side only if the rides do not include these roads.
The CEO recently wrote on X that safety drivers should be removed “by end of year.”
Several Wall Street analysts say the company’s future lies in autonomy — a point reinforced by the Board of Directors when proposing Musk’s compensation plan for the next decade.
The plan hinges not only on Tesla reaching a $7.5 trillion valuation, which depends more on AI products than on vehicle sales, but also on successfully deploying 1 million Robotaxis (and delivering 1 million Optimus humanoid robots).
RBC Capital’s Tom Narayan estimates that “Tesla‘s humanoid robot segment accounts for 36% of its total valuation,” while the recently launched Robotaxi contributes another 37%.
Tesla‘s Robotaxi service was launched with a fleet of Model Ys modified with the “Robotaxi FSD (Full Self-Driving).”
Tesla owners can only integrate the FSD (Supervised) in their vehicles, for which the “second biggest update ever” (after V12) was launched earlier this month.
