The wait to try Tesla’s robo-taxi service for most residents of Austin, Texas, not to mention investors and reporters, is almost over.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted recently that his company’s robo-taxis would be “open access next month.” That’s September. So anyone wanting to try out the offering and compare it to Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving taxi operation should be able to do it in two to six weeks.
Tesla launched its self-driving taxis in Austin eight weeks ago. It was a modest launch with a handful of Tesla Model Ys ferrying Tesla-selected passengers around a limited section of Austin with a safety monitor in the front passenger seat. Still, the car did the driving, and Tesla has slowly expanded the area of Austin served by its self-driving cars.
But Tesla hasn’t yet opened up the service to anyone willing to try it. That, apparently, will change soon. There should be additional software upgrades by September. Tesla’s robo-taxis essentially run using the company’s Full Self Driving, or FSD, software. The AI-trained product improves—which is to say drives a little better—with each new iteration.
“The FSD release in about 6 weeks will be a dramatic gain,” added Musk in a tweet from August 10. “It’s going through training and testing now.”
Tesla’s self-driving systems use optical cameras and the FSD software. Waymo, which completes more than 250,000 fully autonomous taxi rides each week, uses radar, laser-based radar, or lidar, and cameras, along with advanced software.
Waymo is the much larger self-driving taxi service now, but Tesla is betting its simpler, less costly, camera-only technology and manufacturing scale will make it the self-driving leader. Essentially, any Tesla manufactured recently running the most up-to-date FSD software can become a robo-taxi, and Tesla can make millions of cars a year.
Winning in self-driving cars is a big deal for both companies and anyone else designing self-driving cars. Wall Street pegs the opportunity for AI-trained ride-hailing services in the trillions of dollars. For many analysts bullish on Tesla stock, the company’s AI projects, including humanoid robots and self-driving technology, account for up to 75% of the company’s total valuation.
Tesla is valued at roughly $1 trillion. Tesla stock closed at $322.16 the day before it launched the robo-taxis on June 22. It closed on Friday at $328.54, up a little more than $6 a share.
Investors might be waiting to see additional progress before bidding shares higher. Musk, as always, has big plans. “I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half of the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” said Musk on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings conference call in July. “That’s at least our goal, subject to regulatory approvals. I think we’ll technically be able to do it…But we are very, very cautious. We don’t want to take any chances.”
Austin represents only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. Getting to 50% in just a few months would be an impressive feat.
