Written by Cláudio Afonso | LinkedIn | X
Three months after unveiling its fully autonomous Cybercab and Robovan models, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that the first unsupervised self-driving rides will begin in Austin this June.
Musk added later in the call that other cities in America will follow “as shortly as possible.” Tesla’s chief executive sees the company operating unsupervised activity “with our internal fleet in several cities by the end of the year.”
“We’re going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June,” Musk stated in the call. “So, I talked to the team… we feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June.”
Musk said last October that the robotaxi would “probably” enter production before 2027 and is expected to cost less than $30,000.
Earlier this week, Tesla showcased its newly produced vehicles driving themselves approximately 1.2 miles from the production line at the Fremont Gigafactory to their designated loading dock lanes without human intervention. On the call, Musk said that the same will “soon” happen in the GigaTexas.
“We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised full self-driving at our factory in Fremont, and we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas,” Musk said.
“These Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin. So, what I’m saying is this is not some far-off mythical situation. It’s literally five, six months away, five months away kind of thing,” he added.
In its shareholder deck, the company said this year “will be a seminal year in Tesla’s history as FSD (Supervised) continues to rapidly improve with the aim of ultimately exceeding human levels of safety.”
