Tesla has started hyping its upcoming ‘unsupervised full self-driving’ launch in Austin in June. Let’s cut through the hype.
Here’s what Tesla will actually launch.
CEO Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla launching self-driving programs in Texas and California in Q2 2025 since last year.
Lately, he has turned Tesla’s focus to a specific paid ride-hailing service using self-driving in Austin, Texas in June. Here’s what he said precisely during Tesla’s last earnings call in January:
So, we’re going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June. So, I talked to the team. We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June. We already have Teslas operating autonomously unsupervised full self-driving at our factory in Fremont, and we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas.
The “unsupervised self-driving” operation in Fremont that Musk is referring to is simply Tesla’s vehicles driving themselves to loading areas at low speeds and on private roads – it’s a world of difference compared to operating unsupervised on public roads.
Speaking of the word “unsupervised,” it’s an important term that comes from Tesla’s telling owners that its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) features require “supervision” at all times.
Therefore, going “unsupervised” is an critical step for Tesla and something that Musk promised would happen for all owners who bought its ‘FSD’ package every year for the last 6 years.
Now, Tesla is hyping the upcoming launch as “the future is autonomous and it starts in Austin, this June”:
With the launch coming within just a few months, there’s still a lot of confusion around what Tesla will actually launch in Austin.
What will Tesla actually launch in Austin
Based on all the information released to date, Tesla plans to have an internal vehicle fleet, consisting of its existing vehicle lineup, although some believe Tesla will also use its new Cybercab, offering a paid ride-hailing service (à la Uber) in a geo-fenced area around Austin.
This is a significant shift for Tesla, which has been promising that all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 have all the hardware necessary for unsupervised self-driving and that it would come through a future over-the-air software update.
Musk has claimed that Tesla would turn a switch and enable millions of robotaxis overnight.
At the same time, he has criticized Waymo’s strategy of deploying its system in mapped geo-fenced areas for being too difficult to scale.
However, Tesla’s upcoming launch in Austin is extremely similar to what Waymo has been operating for years, with the main difference being that Tesla only uses cameras while Waymo uses a full array of different sensors, including lidar.
Musk also said that the Austin service will be “unsupervised” with “no one in the car,” but those are not exactly the same.
While there might be no one in the cars, we reported that Tesla was looking to hire people to work in teleoperation to support its self-driving vehicles shortly after announcing its plan for unsupervised ride-hailing services in Texas and California last year.
This would suggest that Tesla will use teleoperation to at least “supervise” the fleet of vehicles to be deployed in Austin.
Electrek’s Take
It’s pretty funny that Tesla would claim “the future is autonomous and it starts in Austin, this June” after Elon claimed that autonomous driving was a “solved problem” 10 years ago.
Furthermore, Waymo has been operating in several cities for years the exact service that Tesla plans to launch in Austin, including in Austin itself, since earlier this year.
To be clear, I’m not saying that Tesla’s launch of this service is a bad thing; I’m just saying it is a massive pivot compared to what Tesla, and Elon in particular, have been claiming it would launch for years.
It feels like after being consistently wrong about when unsupervised self-driving is coming for the last 6 years, Elon needs a win, and this enables Tesla to claim that it delivered self-driving – even if it’s not the unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles that it has been promising owners for years.
It will help distract from the current mess that comes with the recent admission that the millions of HW3 vehicles on the road will not be capable of self-driving. I also think that HW4 vehicles are going to be next.
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