During his latest investor call, for Tesla’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call, Elon Musk made a big announcement. Starting in June, the brand will launch a fully autonomous, unattended driving service in Austin, Texas, in June.
The announcement follows a previous speech by the automaker’s CEO, where Elon Musk indicated that Tesla would launch unattended autonomous driving in California and Texas in the second quarter of this year. It would therefore seem that the choice was made specifically for Austin.
The idea of seeing an unsupervised autonomous driving service "as a paid service" more widely in Texas, as well as in California, should arrive "later this year", specified the boss, known for always projecting himself to the short-term horizon when it comes to autonomous driving at Tesla.
As Fred Lambert, editor-in-chief of specialist site Electrek, analyzed, today's announcement looks more like a downward revision of Tesla's projections. In fact, there is no longer any question of using the customer fleet (via the Tesla Network project), but rather a series of specific examples.
Using the fleet of customer models was, however, the subject of a promise by Elon Musk since 2016. Today, there is even speculation as to whether the service that will be launched in June in Austin will not initially be organized with employees on board, to supervise the driving.
However, Elon Musk specified that Tesla would not offer unsupervised autonomous driving until its system is "much safer than human drivers". A sensible statement, but which does not in any way meet the fabulous schedule promised for ten years by the electric car manufacturer.
In Austin, Tesla will coexist with Waymo
The idea behind Tesla's pilot service is reminiscent of that of its great rival, Waymo, which uses a special fleet of specially equipped cars, which are not intended to belong to particular customers who would decide to make them available in car sharing.
Austin is also a city that attracts Waymo. In October 2024, Google's subsidiary for autonomous driving announced that it would launch in the Texan city in early 2025, in parallel with a deployment in Atlanta, in the state of Georgia. Since March 2024, a fleet has been available on site, but it is only accessible to the company's employees, operating mainly in San Francisco (California), Los Angeles (California) and Phoenix (Arizona).
At Tesla, the operation of a paid autonomous taxi service in Austin is expected to operate on Model Y and Model 3. For the time being, the start of production of the Cybercab, Tesla's famous Robotaxi, is not planned before next year. To discover all its secrets, 01net.com was able to discover the autonomous car, during a special tour in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway.
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