Tesla’s robotaxis will “tentatively” start driving around Austin on Sunday, Elon Musk said on X. The company is starting out with a small fleet of roughly 10 cars, which will travel around what Tesla considers to be the city’s “safest areas.”
“It’s not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident [it will] do well in that intersection,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC. “We're going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment, as we should be.”
By the end of June, Musk said the first robotaxi will be ready to drive itself from the factory to a customer's house. By the end of 2026, he said he expects hundreds of thousands of Tesla robotaxis to launch in cities across the country.
But several Austin-area Democratic lawmakers and safety advocates are urging Musk to slow down that timeline.
In a letter signed Wednesday, lawmakers asked Tesla to delay the launch until Sept. 1, when new safety guidelines for autonomous vehicles will go into effect.
The new rules will require driverless cars to be authorized by the Department of Motor Vehicles. To get clearance from the DMV, driverless cars need to be equipped with a recording device and cause “minimal risk” if the technology fails, among other requirements. Companies also need to submit a plan for first responders detailing how they should approach emergency situations involving driverless cars.
If Tesla doesn’t delay the launch, lawmakers are asking for a detailed report of how the company will comply with the new law.
"These regulations are meant to ensure that before any new autonomous vehicle hits the road that they are thoroughly tested and can perform in a manner engendering confidence among the public about their safety for riders and other road users,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt said in a statement.
Tesla’s robotaxis have already driven on Austin roads with a passenger in the driver’s seat ready to intervene if anything goes awry. In the CNBC interview, Musk said, so far, the company has seen “essentially no interventions.” But Musk’s reassurances have done little to quell the worries of lawmakers, safety advocates and experts.
Tesla’s robotaxis don’t operate the same way most other self-driving models roaming around Austin do. Waymo, for example, uses lasers, radar and a host of cameras to create a detailed map the car uses to navigate roads and abruptly stop if necessary. Tesla’s autonomous vehicles don’t use lasers or radar, and they rely on fewer cameras.
It’s unclear if Tesla’s robotaxis will use a new version of the “Full Self-Driving” technology that is already available in the cars it sells. The software has been under investigation by the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration since October, after the agency got reports of several crashes, including one that resulted in a pedestrian death.
During a test of Tesla’s latest Full Self-Driving technology conducted last week by The Dawn Project, a public safety advocacy group based in California, a Tesla failed to stop at a school bus stop sign and subsequently hit eight child-sized dummies.
“They claim its self-driving software, it’s a robotaxi, it can drive itself. And yet it is absolutely clear that doesn’t know what a school bus is,” Dan O’Dowd, founder of The Dawn Project said. “It sees it as a truck.”
Tesla did not respond to questions about whether its fleet of robotaxis will be compliant with the new rules.
