Elon Musk is claiming that Tesla has started doing ‘unsupervised self-driving trials internally’. He made the claim while playing video games, and It should be taken with a grain, or pound, of salt.
Yesterday afternoon, on a Tuesday, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and defacto in charge of 6 companies and a government department, was playing video games and streaming on X for more than an hour.
During the stream, fans were asking him questions and one of them was about Tesla’s self-driving effort.
Musk said:
Tesla Full Self-Driving unsupervised, maybe I’ll mention, we are going to [correct himself], we actually are doing trials of that with Tesla employees already and we expect to have that in commercial service sometime this year, which I mentioned at the last earnings call.
There are two things that Musk said at the last earnings call. He did indeed claim that Tesla would launch its “unsupervised Full Self-Driving” capability in California and Texas around Q2 2025.
He also said that Tesla started testing its robotaxi ride-hailing app with employees in the Bay Area:
We have for Tesla employees in the Bay Area. We already are offering ride-hailing capabilities. So, you can actually — with the development app, you can request a ride, and it will take you anywhere in the Bay Area.
However, he also said that Tesla had “safety drivers” behind the wheel for this test program, which means that it is no more than its current “Supervised Full Self-Driving,” a level 2 driver assist system. It is mainly to test the ridesharing features of the app rather than a different version of its self-driving system.
That makes sense, considering that Tesla would need a permit to operate a self-driving vehicle in California, even as part of a test program, and we haven’t found Tesla’s permit application yet
With this new comment, Musk clearly said “unsupervised” self-driving.
Electrek’s Take
I wouldn’t be shocked if Elon misspoke here while playing video games or he is plain confused about the situation.
Considering Tesla doesn’t have any permit to operate driverless vehicles, if it is operating a “unsupervised self-driving trials internally”, it has to be doing it on private property, which could be no more than the Cybercabs we have seen driving around Gigafactory Texas.
It’s not much different than Tesla’s ‘We, Robot’ event, which was purposely located at Warner Bros’ studio lot, which are private roads.
I seriously doubt that Tesla is currently operating unsupervised self-driving vehicles on public roads.
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