Tesla is trying to fool investors into thinking it has a San Francisco Robotaxis
In today’s Q3 Tesla shareholder letter, Tesla claimed to have launched a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area “with Robotaxi technology,” but that’s not possible because the company isn’t licensed to operate an autonomous taxi in California.
After years of promises, Tesla finally started offering its “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas this June. The Robotaxi service isn’t really a robotaxi, by what we’d expect from the colloquial definition, as each car currently has a “safety monitor” inside it at all times, with access to a kill switch should things go south.
It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride so far, but this is one step towards the autonomous promises Tesla has been making for about a decade.
Tesla also recently made its first autonomous local car delivery, although we’ve only seen one example, so it appears to be more of a publicity stunt than an actual sustainable piece of business.
Along with the Robotaxis unveiling in Austin, Musk made some big claims about what’s to come. In July, just a month after the Austin rollout, Musk said Tesla would cover half of the U.S. population by the end of the year. We’re now three months later and two months from the end of this year, and Tesla has made zero progress on that goal — covering about the same area as before, just in one relatively small city.
Well, are they two cities? If you ask Tesla, it also launched a Robotaxi-like product in San Francisco, the metro area where the company was founded and where other self-driving companies have operated for years.
In Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter released today, the company included a line saying it “launched a ride-hailing service in the Bay Area using Robotaxi technology” in Q3. Later, on a conference call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said “in the Bay Area, where we still have someone in the driver’s seat because of regulations, we’ve done over a million miles” during a portion of the call about Tesla’s Robotaxi program.
Note, however, that while both of these statements are very clearly Robotaxi-neighboringthey’re still kind of sidestepping the direct statement that Tesla launched Robotaxis in San Francisco… because, well, it didn’t.
Despite the company’s statements today, its ride-hailing service is just that — ride-hailing, similar to Uber or Lyft, with nothing special except the fact that the cars involved are Teslas and that those cars have access to Tesla’s Level 2 driver assistance system.
Functionally, there is no difference between hailing a ride on this service and hailing a ride from a Tesla driver who drives for Uber or Lyft, except that you use a different app to do so. Well, and that the app is only limited to an exclusive group of Tesla Early Access customers, rather than open to the general public like other ride-hailing apps.
One of the reasons for this, and the reason we know Tesla isn’t running a real robotaxis in California, is because it can’t. Tesla received a license to drive earlier this year, but has not received permission to operate an actual driverless taxi service. Those permits do exist in California and have been obtained by other companies — but they come with reporting requirements that Tesla has so far been reluctant to meet.
But that didn’t stop Tesla from claiming the very first line item in “highlights” of its “operations” for the quarter that it made some kind of breakthrough with Robotaxi by launching it in the Bay Area.
This seems like a relatively small introduction, especially given that it was mentioned in previous quarterly conference calls. But despite the lack of forward movement on Tesla’s autonomous project (and actually some regression), Tesla wanted to signal to investors that something big happened this quarter. But it isn’t.
Tesla went on to talk about the future of Robotaxi on the call, saying it will be coming to 8-10 metro areas by the end of the year. That’s a far cry from the at least 47 metro areas that were promised just three months ago, and yet it still looks like it may not be achieved with just two months left in the year.
Musk said in the call that the public can see where Tesla has applied for permits, specifically naming Arizona, Nevada and Florida. Notably, California was not on this list. He also said that Tesla will likely phase out the “safety monitor” from its Austin Robotaxis by the end of this year, and that future metro areas will start with safety monitors and phase them out after a few months.
We’ll have to wait and see if any of these things happen. But the fact that Tesla is using deceptive language in front of its investors, especially when it’s also asking them to give Musk $1 trillion (so he can control a robot army), doesn’t give us the sense that there’s a lot of honesty going on here. If a company can deceive shareholders in one way as it has done today (and as it has done in the past), it will likely lie to shareholders in other ways as well.
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