Autonomous Teslas will be ferrying Austinites around as soon as this summer, according to the automaker's CEO.
Elon Musk told CNBC in an interview Tuesday the company's been testing autonomous vehicles in Austin, and that the leading electric carmaker will roll out a small fleet of 10 fully autonomous cabs by the end of June.
"I think it's prudent for us to start with a small number," he said. "We'll start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40, and I think ... we'll probably be at a thousand within a few months, then we'll expand to other cities."
Musk said Tesla would use Austin as a proving ground for its unsupervised autonomous taxi service, before it's expanded to cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Tesla's not the first company to feature fully autonomous ride-hailing services in Austin.
After years of testing, Waymo launched an autonomous taxi service on Uber this spring. Waymo's foray into unsupervised robotaxis has seemingly rolled out without incident.
Austin has had a decade-long history with autonomous vehicle operators. In 2015, the city hosted the world's first truly driverless ride in Northeast Austin.
In the years that followed, the city became a test track for Waymo and other operators in the AV space. A 2017 state law banned local regulation of AVs, which proved problematic in the past. GM-owned Cruise's robot cars exhibited "alarming" behavior on Austin roads, and scores of people complained to 311 that they were almost hit by the vehicles. Cruise shuttered its operations shortly after.
Austin's Transportation and Public Works Department says it's been working with Tesla, providing information about school zones, information on traffic control and protocols on how to interact with first-response vehicles.
"Although cities in Texas cannot regulate AVs, Austin has worked with autonomous vehicle companies as they enter the market to offer staff's knowledge on the local transportation network to help AVs operate more safely," a city spokesperson said.
Musk told CNBC that Tesla expects "hundreds of thousands" of autonomous vehicles to be on the roads by the end of 2026, but said the carmaker will keep a close eye on operations in Austin before that nationwide rollout.
"We're going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment, as we should be. It would be very foolish not to be," he said. "So we'll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully."
