Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors last year that the company was aiming for a 2025 launch of its self-driving service in California and Texas. The company appears to be on track to hit that target. Musk said during Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday that the automaker is on pace to launch its self-driving service as early as June 2025, with Austin, Texas, as the test market.
“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,” Musk said. “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.”
A representative for Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
News that Tesla was working with Austin to gain the city’s regulatory approval first appeared in emails obtained by Bloomberg in December, but Tesla had not yet chosen Austin as the launch city as the company was attempting to gain regulatory approval.
Musk was light on details, stating only that there were “thousands of cars” driving around the company’s Fremont factory in California “with no one in them.” He did say that the company was prepared to launch its unsupervised Full Self-Driving tech “in many regions of the US” by the end of the year, with the first markets most likely being California and Texas.
The original expectation was that Tesla would use its long-awaited Cybercab. However, the company instead plans to use its Model Y and Model 3 cars until the Cybercab launches in 2027.
“So, in conclusion, 2025 is a really pivotal year for Tesla,” Musk said. “I think we may regard it as the biggest year in Tesla history.”
Rough start for self-driving cars
Musk stressed that Tesla was going to take its time with the rollout.
“We just want to put our toe in the water, make sure everything is OK, then put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water with (the) safety of the general public… and those in the car as our top priority,” he said.
Tesla’s emphasis on safety comes amid a rough couple of years for self-driving taxi services. While the statistics show that self-driving cars are safer in general than human drivers, it hasn’t stopped accidents from making the news.
California pulled Cruise driverless cars off the road in 2023 due to safety concerns, and Waymo made the news in early 2024 after two of its autonomous vehicles hit the same pickup truck as it was being towed two times in the same day.
According to Musk, Tesla’s AI won’t use high-precision local maps like most autonomous driving tech. Instead, Teslas will use AI that will analyze the road and make decisions as it drives. Thus, while it can drive anywhere, Austin will serve as the test market to make sure that the cars can drive without issues before they spread to other regions. Tesla anticipates a wider launch shortly after Austin, provided there are no issues.
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