Elon Musk claims that Tesla Robotaxi is coming to California within the next 2 months, pending regulatory approval, but no one other than Tesla shareholders appears to believe him.
Tesla has been moving the goalpost on self-driving for years. Moving away from its promise of unsupervised self-driving in all consumer vehicles built since 2016, to now a Robotaxi service in a geo-fenced area operated by an internal fleet and currently with in-car supervisors.
Despite the goalpost moving, Tesla shareholders are holding on to the hope that the automaker might be able to scale faster than Waymo, which has a significant lead with operations in several cities and without supervisors inside the vehicles.
CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla will expand its Robotaxi service area in Austin, as it currently only covers South Austin.
The CEO also said that Tesla will bring Robotaxi to the Bay Area in California with “a month or two” and that the company is just waiting for “regulatory approvals”:
This news sent Tesla’s stock soaring yesterday, but it looks like only shareholders believed the CEO.
The odds of Tesla bringing its Robotaxi to California on Polymarket’s prediction market went down to only 18.5% following Musk’s comments:
The odds were at over 30% in late June before Musk commented on July 9.
The odds reflect the fact that Musk is lying, which California’s Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed in an email to Reuters.
Tesla obtained a ride-hailing permit in California earlier this year, but it is not for self-driving vehicles. The automaker would require three more permits to launch the same service it launched in Austin.
The CA DMV said that Tesla has yet to apply for those permits as of Thursday, July 10:
“To date, Tesla has not applied for either a driverless testing or deployment permit.”
If Tesla hasn’t even applied for the permits, it would mean that the bottleneck is not regulatory approval, as Musk claimed.
California requires several permits to operate an autonomous ride-hailing service in different testing and commercial phases. They also require companies developing autonomous driving systems to release their disengagement data, something Tesla has avoided like the plague for years.
Electrek’s Take
It shows that only Tesla shareholders believe Musk at this point. With a favorability rating of just 21%, he is disliked by most, and people are understandably skeptical of what he says.
To be fair, the prediction markets also often add requirements like the Robotaxi being available to the wider public and not having supervisors, which disqualifies what Tesla currently offers in Austin.
At some point, reality will have to set in and shareholders will realize that Tesla has the same bottlenecks in scaling Robotaxi as Waymo does for its own service – minus maybe the fact that Waymo is more careful with safety.
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