Elon Musk said on Wednesday that Tesla targets rolling out its autonomous ride-hailing service to areas covering roughly half of the US population by the end of the year, pending regulatory approvals.
Speaking during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call, the chief executive outlined aggressive expansion plans for the company’s supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.
“We were expecting to really greatly increase the motion service area to well in excess of what competitors could,” Musk told analysts. “And that’s hopefully in a week or so, two weeks, yeah, couple of weeks or so.”
Musk added that Tesla was seeking regulatory clearance to launch the service in major US states.
“We’re getting the regulatory permission to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, and a number of… Florida, a number of other places,” he said.
“As soon as we get the approvals and we prove out safety, then we will be launching autonomous ride-hailing in most of the country.”
He projected that Tesla would have coverage “probably [for] half of the population of the US by the end of the year.”
However, he cautioned that this expansion is “subject to regulatory approvals,” though he believes the company will be “technically able to do it.”
Despite the ambitious timeline, Musk stressed the company’s commitment to safety: “We are being very cautious. We don’t want to take any chances… we’re going to go cautiously.”
He added that once regulatory hurdles are cleared, the service area and number of vehicles “will increase at a hyper exponential rate.”
Tesla started offering paid fully driverless rides in Austin late last month, with an initial fleet of about 10 Model Ys covering a five-mile radius service area.
Last week, the company expanded the geofenced area of its robotaxi service in Austin, doubling the original service zone introduced in late June.
Musk had recently said that the ride-hailing service will “probably” be coming to the Bay Area “in a month or two — “as soon as the regulators approve it.”
On Sunday, he reinforced that the service will be arriving in San Francisco “as soon as the regulators approve” it, adding that “they are being quite reasonable.”
The EV maker aims to have “hundreds of thousands, if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the US” by the end of next year, according to Musk.
Earlier on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Tesla has begun preliminary discussions with Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles regarding a potential launch of its robotaxi service in Nevada.
In mid-June, when the first Model Y operating as part of Tesla’s ride-hailing service was spotted, Elon Musk stated that these are “unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory.”
