Elon Musk confirms Tesla plan for robotaxis on Austin roads in June

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Looking forward to all the robotaxi hate crimes followed up by a FBI investigation.

two weeks?

I think the robot brains that were drawing swastikas on teslas are onto the next thing at this point

lol, yeah, right.

The first sentence says “by the end of June”

Definitely, maybe.

Tesla should revive the show ‘Bait Car’ with the amount of cameras covering all angles of this vehicle. Guaranteed there will be stupid people fucking around with it Tesla may as well monetize it and we get entertainment from it hahah

This won’t age well

2 weeks maybe, 6 weeks definitely

This article is reporting the following quote from Elon's [CNBC interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=825mfVr32Io): Interviewer - "Are you going to have full autonomous on the roads of Austin by the end of June?" Elon - "Yes."

June 2099

If there is one thing that Musk is known for, it’s he always keeps his promises! 😂

June 2025 , 2026, 2027.

Since many won't read the article, here's the tl;dr: 1. Starting with 10 vehicles, making sure everything is good, and "rapidly scaling up" to thousands. 2. Cars will be current production Model Ys, running an upcoming FSD release aka "FSD Unspervised." 3. Geofenced to Austin. 4. No human safety driver, but will be closely monitored by teleoperations people. Starting with very close monitoring, and as confidence grows, will need less monitoring.

Also, you can hail a Taxi on Mars by July

Assuming full autonomous = level 2

We about to make history! Just depends on what kind.. 🤔

Ugh the interviewer didn’t ask him WHICH JUNE Could be June 2026, June 2027, June 2040….

For employees on testing team only at first, probably.

I’m actually quite surprised there will be no safety operators and sort of expected them at the beginning. I’m curious how they’d prevent a passenger from yanking the steering wheel or tossing a bowling ball at the pedals. (How does Waymo solve for that?)

🤣

They are already running them with safety drivers in Austin and San Fran for employee use..

Totally, I just sort of assumed they’d continue to do so for paying customers, at least at the beginning.

So who is responsible when it causes a fatal accident?

Whoosh!

Oh yeah it's so real this time. So much crow is about to be eaten by the "cameras will never work" crowd. I can't wait.

How does Uber with humans solve for that? Like if you just grab the wheel and overpower the driver, is it assault?

He said nobody in the driver's seat, so that's Level 4. It's already been Level 2 for years.

The RealDoll company woulld be glad to supply safety drivers.

The company, just like with airplane crashes or anything else of that nature.

Have there been any sightings of completely empty Teslas driving around Austin yet? I'd assume they'll wanna do that before they add paying passengers

Lol...first time hearing an Elon promise?

Good luck Austin

I've used my FSD a lot and there is no chance I'd let someone I love be in that car without a human ready to take over. It's cool, it is nice on road trips to take your mind off the road, and it's advanced a long way but it is not ready for driverless usage. One of my main concerns isn't even for safety in the vehicle. I'm more concerned with disruption to traffic which may make other drivers make risky decisions. Left on its own my FSD usually cannot get out of my neighborhood which requires a left hand turn into a busy street. You get a few of these things clogging up turn lanes and what happens around them? Also, some people that see a driverless Tesla are likely to mess with it by swerving, break checking, etc. Wrong time, wrong product, wrong CEO.

Teleportations? I always knew that a kid in China was driving these things

Nope. I've heard them countless times. When they're this close, they almost always happen. And all the evidence is pointing towards this being real. You need more nuance than "Elon is always right" or "Elon is always wrong". Neither is true.

I thought there were going to be remote safety drivers as a backstop.

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If this wipes out uber and Lyft drivers nationally I wouldn’t be surprised. Thousands of dollars a month to “spare chaaaaaange”

Of course it will. That's a matter of when, not if. It's gonna be great.

In a Waymo, nothing happens if you pull the steering wheel. Presumably, they have full control over the power steering motors, so no human can pull hard enough to override what their system is telling the car to do. Ideally, Tesla can do the same.

Even that is a big step if they do so.

Yea, that’s how they’ll get away with saying “it’s currently live in June”. But they won’t say how often intervention is required, or how limited it really is. “It’s perfect!” But they’ll omit that it goes from the lead testers home to hq and that it’s only 3 blocks away.

China self driving is like this they just put a plastic shell over the driving components.

Well, I recently saw an Uber driver on a video pull a gun on their passenger to make them get out. I’m sure there’s a continuum of possibilities when a person is sitting there to ask you not to touch their shit or swat your hand away.

Can you ride in the front passenger seat of a Waymo?

Yup, I see people do that all the time.

They use drive by wire and steer by wire.   This means it’s not a mechanical connection to the wheels and steering.  Just disable to electronic signal and you can move the steering as you wish. It won’t do anything.

Kinda agree on this… based on seeing the updates in the app, the roll out plan, already doing drives in Austin with employees, geofenced to safe areas, this does seem pretty real now. I use my FSD downtown Austin all the time with zero issues. Would imagine it will be on a much better release.

My opinion isn't worth much on this. I think there's a VERY slim chance of that, though. The liability issue is huge. Tesla really wants its car owners to be able to push a button on their phone and let their car drive off with nobody in it to be a driverless Uber, and split the proceeds, but I think the leap between "small geofenced Austin rollout with professionals watching the fleet all the time" and "letting users' cars drive around unsupervised" is a MASSIVE gulf. I think what is likely is that, late this year, users with AI4 hardware get a version of FSD Unsupervised that just has driver monitoring stuff still enabled. All the driving enhancements, but still with the "supervised" requirement to be in the driver's seat and ready to take over.

You don’t have the latest version of unsupervised FSD + higly monitored with teleoperation when needed.

The riders will be chosen before hand, they’re not gonna let anyone get in

Sure. Their internal version is sooo advanced. Matter of fact, they even released a shitty version on purpose a week ago. Because that makes total sense.

These will 100% be either remote operated or monitored 1:1 24/7 with a human ready to intervene at all times. That's why the quantity is 10.

They have been doing that for months already.

Having them be remotely operated is just a taxi with extra steps and completely undermines the point of developing FSD, so definitely won't be what they're doing They will probably have constant supervision initially though as, as you said. Which to me seems like a prudent precaution initially

Remember Amazon? Having someone in India monitor what shoppers pick up off the shelves totally undermined the point of that too They did it with the intention of the technology catching up and it becoming feasible. It never did. It wouldn't surprise me if Tesla tried a similar approach. Remote operated to say they've met deadlines. To buy more time to fix the issues. 10 is purely to satisfy his June 2025 claim. Anyone who's ever used FSD knows it's years away from unsupervised use.

FSD is an actual software feature that people can buy though, and we can see how it does from all the videos people can freely upload, and at this point it's very good The Amazon analogy is also closer to having the robotaxi's be monitored, rather than remotely operated

Like level 4-5? Absolutely not

I’ve just been to LA and San Francisco. The self driving waymos are incredible. I had no idea the technology had come so far already and that Tesla now needs to catch up.

They’re already running robotaxi with safety operators for employees in austin. for a couple months now

They’re going to have teleoperators monitoring the cars. But that’s still L4 because there’s no driver, it’s actually fully autonomous. A safety driver sitting in the front would make it L3.

Is it confirmed that there's no option to remote control the cars? Otherwise, yes it's level 4.

Waymo also has remote operators, it's more for safety, not to support it's normal operations

Tesla doesn’t, does Waymo?

That’s not true. It pulls over, and you get scolded: https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/just-what-ive-heard-woman-finds-out-the-hard-way-what-happens-if-you-try-to-grab-the-steering-wheel-in-a-driverless-vehicle/

They don’t use drive/steer by wire. It’s just a regular Jaguar

Nah they don’t. Cybertruck is the first and only Tesla to be steer by wire.

Curious if robotaxj will have any sort of emergency breaks

Good point!

Thanks king.

That’s what I thought. There’s no way the steering motor is going to be strong enough to overpower a person tugging on the wheel. I imagine it’ll be the same with the Model Y.

Tesla is trying to do it with cameras so they can scale it at a cheaper cost. Waymo radars are way more precise but waymo expensive. It’s not really a matter of catching up tech it’s two different approaches. I prefer waymos nail it then scale it approach. Tesla seems to want to scale it when we all know their fsd isn’t ready.

Probably Tesla owners that have access to FSD already. Then Tesla owners, then EV owners who have the Tesla app for charging, then everyone else.

I would argue it's attempted murder.

The issue is the hardware. Only the new Model Ys with the new hardware are going to be allowed to operate the unsupervised FSD. It will take years for the other Teslas to be retrofitted.

That's already happening.

They are already doing that though.

Eh, when the time frames are in the months, they are pretty spot on. It's when he talks about things a year + away where he has major problems.

CA sued Tesla because they were operating at level 3 with no permits.

every autonomous car will have the option for remote driving. Not having that would just be stupid. Are we just going to arbitrarily say that no car will ever have level 5 because of that? If so, we just need to change what level 5 means.

nah, when they are weeks away from something, its gonna happen in that time frame.

The faster AI driving comes, the safer we all will be. No more drunk drivers, no more texting drivers, blinded drivers, shitty old people drivers. 40 thousand people die in the USA every year because humans are absolute shit drivers.

And that’s all they’re going to get. No real customers are taking rides by end of June.

Absolutely not. There's a reason they are geofencing just to a single city.

> But they won’t say how often intervention is required I'm pretty sure this information has to be reported.

Why? Having a safety driver in the seat and that driver having to do nothing is no different than not having someone in the driver's seat. Why do you think they need to do phantom rides first?

And some people refer to that shitty version as an improvement, because in their environ the changes *were* an improvement. Driving isn't just driving..

You're using a code base designed for the entire US, not an optimized code base that has been specifically and repetitively trained and tested to handle one city. There's a reason it's being geofenced to Austin.

People said the same thing about Waymo.

FSD : - Still has trouble with driving in the right lane. - Still has trouble identifying red lights - Still has trouble lane centering on CT - Still has trouble reading speed signs Wake up dude, if they had something better to release, they'd simply release it.

A steering motor _easily_ overpowers a human. Try turning the wheels without the power on. They just don't disable the hardware-level coupling of torque sensors and the motor.

Sigh. Improvements in some locales will cause regressions in others is the point I was trying to make.

Yeah you’re right. So then maybe if nobody else is in the car, it’s attempted suicide.

lol he just told a bold lie and hoped no one would check

How would this work for Tesla? Their robotaxi (MY) doesn’t have it

Got more upvotes though. In today’s Reddit, facts don’t matter. People say and upvote what they want to be true and downvote what they want to be false. Actual facts are irrelevant. People are living in the reality they choose in their head, not the reality they actually live in. It’s a big problem. I mean, this example is tame. And some of it is probably just that more people saw the lie than the correction. So maybe this is the wrong place for me to be ranting about this, but I can’t help myself

Doesn't matter. The server will just send it different nav when unsupervised. Avoiding left turns, stupid intersections, etc.

Austin already has AI driverless driving. Tesla is not being it, first, or second.

You got a point.

Even if the steering motor isn't strong, after riding without steering, you generally underestimate the required effort, and would not react in time to avoid whatever caught your attention. This happens the first time doing something like landing a paraglider and falling on your face because the legs won't work. If Tesla is taking responsibility then maybe they should also take control.

Yes, probably. It looks like the taxi stuff is built into the existing app.

I think they could quite easily remove the steering wheel and pedals altogether. It would even free up an additional seat. I would be surprised if they do this from the start though.

If tesla had lidar they be world Beaters

When geofenced they will heavily train to that specific location which will improve performance there. There will be a training for each taxi region probably.

Of course, that's why the geofence.

What happens if a tire gets punctured?

I am not entirely certain what your point is. Yes, they are not the first to be offering driverless cars. Very good. However, they are the first who have a reasonable plan to scale it up fast. If (and it is still an "if" at this moment) they actually are at the point where this works, then it will scale \*very\* fast. The others who were there first were very helpful, because they made sure the legal hurdles were all taken care of before Tesla reached this point. However, those like Waymo who have been trying to make this work have no viable plan for scaling this up. They are still losing something like $5 billion per year running their cars, and they have yet to show any sort of benefits from the modest scaling up they have managed.

This is \*exactly\* what they will be doing. At first. And of course that makes sense. You would not want it any other way. But yeah: as confidence grows that these are not just going to drive off a cliff or into traffic, they'll start paring back how much supervision is needed until it is effectively zero.