Tesla’s Robotaxi business is growing. But the hard work is far from over
- Tesla’s full self-driving is starting to grow, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday.
- The automaker’s driver-assistance software is getting more robust, and Musk says it’s almost good enough to take off the training wheels.
- Tesla believes it will be able to remove the safety driver from its car by the end of the year.
Tesla says its Full Self-Driving software is finally growing. But like a teenager with a student’s permit, the software isn’t quite ready to go unsupervised — yet.
That should change by the end of the year, at least that’s what Elon Musk claimed on Wednesday.
During Tesla’s quarterly earnings, the CEO promised that its Robotaxi fleet in Austin will have safety controls removed by the end of the year, avoiding any roadblocks from regulators. It also plans to expand its services to 8 to 10 metro areas.
“It depends on various regulatory approvals,” Musk said. “You can actually see most of our regulatory applications online because it’s public information. We expect to be operational in Nevada, Florida and Arizona by the end of the year.”
Tesla currently operates in Austin, Texas and the Bay Area near San Francisco, California. It also apparently plans to launch in Illinois and Colorado, as job postings last week indicated.
So far, Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet has logged 250,000 miles in Texas and over a million miles in California. FSD Supervised — the version that anyone with a Tesla can get for $8,000 today — has amassed a whopping 6 billion kilometers to date, an ocean of data that Tesla trained on. That being said, it’s still not enough for Musk to go full throttle and call for the safety controls to be removed.
The CEO says it “makes sense” to keep the safety driver in the front seat at least for a while.
“I think even if the regulators don’t force us to do that (…), it makes sense to have a safety driver or passenger in the car,” Musk said during the call. He added that Tesla will use the safety controls for “maybe 3 months” when it enters a new market to make sure there are no area-specific challenges, then pull the controls and let the cars drive themselves.
Musk also made a rather impractical conservative point about current customer software: early releases aren’t for everyone.
“We need time to smooth out the rough edges,” he admitted.
He approved that the brand new major versions of the FSD prioritize technical progress and safety over convenience. This means waiting for an incremental release like FSD F14.2.1 or later (the most advanced version available today is 14.1.3) before upgrading if convenience is a big concern. But if you want the latest and greatest today, you owners can still enable “advanced” software updates on your cars, giving them access to more experimental versions.
New and cool, or stable and safe. Everyone can choose.
Speaking of news, Musk says Tesla also plans to bring the rationale for a future release of its new FSD software version 14. That will allow the car to make more complex decisions based on the world around it, such as deciding where to look for parking after dropping the driver off at the front door of a store. For example, if the parking lot is crowded, the car may choose to look for a space at the back of the parking lot rather than directly in front.
The real test is whether or not humans can write and drive — or so Musk says. The car isn’t there yet, but driver assistance software seems to be moving forward quickly. I may not leave the HAL 9000 of 2025, but it’s getting there.
For now, Musk says he remains confident that the FSD will ultimately be safer than a human driver without someone behind the wheel. Surprisingly, he didn’t give an exact timeline for this metric, but the context around it paints a bigger picture: the rollout of geofenced could begin soon. Until then, Tesla’s customer version of FSD will require constant human supervision.