Tesla has already launched an autonomous taxi service, but you can only use it if you’re working at Tesla.
On Wednesday, the company announced on X it launched an “FSD Supervised ride-hailing service” (meaning Full Self-Driving) for an “early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay Area.”
According to Tesla, the service has already completely more than 1,500 trips and over 15,000 driving miles.
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It’s just a test before the real thing goes live, supposedly in June this year, as CEO Elon Musk told investors in January. “This service helps us develop & validate FSD networks, the mobile app, vehicle allocation, mission control & remote assistance operations,” the company wrote on X on Wednesday.
Robot, take the wheel: What you need to know about autonomous vehicles rolling out across the U.S.
After years of teasers from Musk, Tesla announced a robotaxi service (and an autonomous car called Cybercab), in October 2024. And while Tesla said at the time Cybercab isn’t due to arrive on the market earlier than 2026, the company also said that an unsupervised, autonomous robotaxi service should arrive in Texas and California in 2025.
This is now partially true, as the service is still supervised. In a video accompanying the announcement above, you can see that a human driver sits in the front seat and monitors the car’s driving during rides. A notice at the bottom of the video says that the “safety driver is present to supervise and only intervene as necessary. FSD (Supervised) does not make the vehicle autonomous.”
It’s nice to see Tesla making progress on its robotaxi vision, though it’s worth noting that other companies, including Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise, have been running driverless, autonomous taxi services for years in parts of California, Arizona, and Texas. Mashable’s Rebecca Ruiz has a first-hand account of hailing Waymo robotaxi and a guide to everything you need to know about robotaxis launching in the U.S.
