Tesla has scaled another hurdle to its plans to offer robotaxi services in Texas: Last week, the company was granted a permit to offer ride-hailing services in the state.
Tesla has been operating a very limited robotaxi service in Austin since June, offering autonomous rides to influencers and Tesla content creators, with a safety driver in the front seat. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said in a social post that robotaxis would be “open access next month.”
Austin American-Statesman technology reporter Karoline Leonard says Tesla will also need approval from the Department of Motor Vehicles before it can launch a publicly available, fully-autonomous service. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So Tesla now has the permit it needs from the state to offer a ride-hailing service throughout Texas. Is that it – pretty cut and dry?
Karoline Leonard: Yeah, yeah, that is definitely it. The only thing that the permit fails to do is it does not qualify the robotaxis as autonomous. That designation has to come directly from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But even without that authorization, Tesla is allowed to start offering services even right now.
So what is that that you caveated there though? Does that mean the permit allows them to operate without a driver or human monitor on board, or is that unclear?
So as of right now, they still need authorization to not have a safety moderator on board. So once they have authorization from the Department of Motor Vehicles, then they can take that safety moderator out and they’ll be fully driverless, similar to a Waymo.
We’ve seen this piloted here in Austin. How has that been going?
So far, the rides have only been offered to influencers or fans, most of which monetize their content by posting about Tesla. So a lot of the reviews have been largely positive.
But there have been videos online showing the cars swerving in traffic, not listening to different traffic laws, stopping in the middle of intersections to drop off riders. So there hasn’t been a totally smooth sailing when it comes to the official launch.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
So Tesla’s robotaxis rely on the company’s self-driving technology. And there have been problems with the privately owned cars that use this. Could you talk about some of those incidents?
Yeah. So the self-driving technology relies solely on cameras as well as machine learning. That’s a little bit of a different approach compared to other autonomous vehicle tech, which relies on LIDAR, which is lasers and radar technologies.
So when it comes to the privately owned vehicles, there have been different incidents. There was recently a trial in Florida that found that Tesla was at fault for a crash that killed a driver who was using the autonomous vehicle technology – at the time, it was known as Autopilot – and looked down at their phone and ended up crashing into a stalled vehicle.
Now, Elon Musk has made a lot of promises about how quickly his ride-hailing service would be up and running. So this permit gives them through August 2026, but do we have any sense of the company’s current plans to get this started in Texas?
Beyond that promise that [public access] is coming next month, we really don’t have an idea what that will look like. They have started offering rides in the San Francisco Bay area, and they have been in discussions with regulators in Nevada as well as Florida to start offering rides there.
As you mentioned, Elon Musk said that he wants driverless robotaxis to be offered to half the U.S. population by the end of the year. Beyond those statements and those promises, there hasn’t really been anything clear saying that this is happening right now.
Is there even a platform for this yet? Can you download a Tesla robotaxi app or something like that?
Yes, there is the Tesla Robotaxi app. The everyday person cannot download it. They have to be invited.
Whenever that open access happens, it seems like it will hit the App Store and everybody will be able to download it, but it’s not offered in the same way that other driverless cars are offered, like Waymo is offered on Uber or on Lyft.
You’d have to go directly through the Tesla robotaxi app, you’d have a Tesla account, and it would have to be in a certain radius and area.
