Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk said on Monday that the company’s robotaxi service, which launched in Austin in late June, will be publicly launched in September.
Answering a user on X, who questioned why the service was still only available through invite, Musk said the service “will be open access next month.”
The service first launched by sending invites to influencers and shareholders.
Later, Tesla opened a sign-up form on its website, allowing anyone to register interest. Only after signing up could people receive an invitation to ride.
According to an X post by Tesla enthusiast Sawyer Merritt, Arizona’s Department of Transportation is currently evaluating Tesla’s applications for autonomous vehicle operations with both a driver and without.
Originally expected to have a decision by the end of July, the MDV now says “a decision is expected by the end of this month.”
Last week, the EV maker was granted a commercial permit by the Texas’ Department of Licencing and Regulation to legally operate its ride-hailing service in the state.
The company was also spotted doing validation testing of its robotaxi in Georgetown, about 30 miles north of Austin.
Since late June, the company has expanded the geofenced area of its robotaxi service in Austin and introduced a dynamic pricing system based on distance, replacing the fixed fare structure.
In the latest earnings call in late July, Musk said it expects the service to be expanded to “probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year.”
“We are getting the regulatory permission to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and a number of other places,” he stated.
The service was introduced late last month in the Bay Area, California, where autonomous driving faces stricter local regulations.
Every ride includes a safety monitor in the driver seat — which makes it similar to other ride-hailing services where the driver owns a Tesla and uses the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature.
Over the past weeks, Musk has said the FSD software will have a “step change improvement” as the company prepares to publicly release its robotaxi service.
He added that “Tesla is training a new FSD model with ~10X params and a big improvement to video compression loss,” which is set to be unveiled by the end of September, “if testing goes well.”
This weekend, he reaffirmed on X that the release is coming “in about 6 weeks.”
“The FSD release in about 6 weeks will be a dramatic gain with a 10X higher parameter count and many other improvements. It’s going through training & testing now,” he wrote.
