Assisted by AI

Tesla to Launch Robotaxi Fleet by End of 2025

Tesla says its robotaxi service is weeks away. On May 20, 2025, Elon Musk told CNBC that Tesla robotaxis would be on the streets of Austin, Texas, by the end of June, and he has said several more U.S. cities will follow by the end of the year. The first cars will be Model Ys, not the Cybercab that Tesla unveiled in October 2024. Here is what Tesla has promised, and what is still unproven.

What Tesla has promised

On Tesla's earnings call on January 29, 2025, Musk said: "We're going to be launching unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June." He added that he was "very confident" of fully autonomous Teslas "in Austin and several other cities in America by the end of this year."

Tesla's first-quarter update on April 22 repeated the plan: "We remain on track for pilot launch of Robotaxi in Austin by June." It also says new Model 3, Model Y and Cybertruck vehicles already drive themselves, unsupervised, from the production line to the outbound lot at its U.S. factories.

In the CNBC interview, Musk described a careful start: "We'll start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40." He expects to "probably be at a thousand within a few months," then to expand to cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. The cars will be geofenced, with no safety driver inside, and Tesla employees will monitor them remotely. In Texas, a 2017 state law bars cities from regulating autonomous vehicles.

The car Tesla showed, and the car it will use

Tesla unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi, the Cybercab, at its "We, Robot" event in Burbank, California, on October 10, 2024. It is a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals, charged by induction rather than a plug. "We expect the cost to be under $30,000," Musk said. He gave a production target of "before 2027", adding: "I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames."

Tesla also showed the Robovan, which can carry up to 20 people. The event had first been planned for August 8, 2024, and was delayed after Musk asked for a design change to the front of the car.

The Cybercab will not be the car in Austin. Tesla says it "is scheduled for volume production starting in 2026", so the first service will use Model Ys running a forthcoming version of Tesla's software, FSD Unsupervised.

The technology bet

Tesla describes its approach as "a vision-only architecture with end-to-end neural networks trained on billions of examples of real-world data." It relies mainly on cameras rather than lidar and radar, which Musk has said are expensive and could hold back high-volume production. Alphabet's Waymo already runs driverless paid rides in several U.S. markets, and Alphabet says it gives 250,000 paid trips a week.

For training, Tesla points to Cortex, "a ~50k H100 training cluster at Gigafactory Texas" that it says helped enable version 13 of FSD (Supervised). Tesla's in-house Dojo supercomputer is not mentioned in either shareholder update it has published so far this year.

What customers can buy today is FSD (Supervised), which in Tesla's own words "does not make the vehicle autonomous." The timeline has also slipped before: CNBC notes that since 2016 Musk has been saying Tesla is about a year away from a car that can carry passengers safely without a human at the wheel.

What the Austin pilot will test

Scale, not the start. Ten geofenced cars is a pilot, not a fleet. The promises to hold Tesla to are "a thousand within a few months" and several cities by the end of the year.
The cheap car is still a year away. The cost case made in Burbank rests on a Cybercab under $30,000 that is not due in volume production until 2026. Until then, the economics are those of a Model Y.
Remote monitoring is the real safety net. Musk says that "as confidence grows, less of that will be needed." How fast Tesla can scale it back, and its safety record when it does, matter more than the launch date.

Update: what happened next (October 2026)

This article was first published on May 28, 2025. Here is how the story has developed since then:

June 2025: Rides began in Austin on June 22 with about ten Model Ys in part of South Austin, for invited riders only, at a flat $4.20. A Tesla employee sat in the front passenger seat as a "safety monitor". After videos appeared to show robotaxis speeding and, in one case, swerving into the wrong lane, NHTSA said it was "in contact with the manufacturer to gather additional information."
July 2025: Tesla launched ride-hailing in the San Francisco Bay Area with an employee at the wheel. California's utilities regulator had said Tesla was not allowed to "test or transport the public" in a self-driving vehicle.
August 2025: Musk confirmed Tesla had shut down Dojo, calling Dojo 2 "an evolutionary dead end".
October 2025: On Tesla's October 22 earnings call, Musk said it expected "to be operating robotaxi in, I think, about eight to 10 metro areas by the end of the year."
January 2026: On January 22, Musk posted: "Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car." Only "a few" cars ran that way at first, said Tesla's head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy. Tesla's January 28 update listed two metro areas in service, Austin and the Bay Area, with seven more planned for the first half of 2026.
April 2026: Unsupervised rides launched in Dallas and Houston, and Tesla listed its Cybercab line at Gigafactory Texas as in pilot production. The same update said Tesla is "continuing our custom silicon development with Dojo 3" to lower the cost of training.
May 2026: From May 28, Texas required companies operating automated vehicles commercially to hold an authorization from its Department of Motor Vehicles, under Senate Bill 2807.
July 2026: Tesla said Cybercab production had started and that unsupervised rides had launched in Miami, Orlando and Tampa, for seven metro areas in total. The Bay Area still uses a safety driver. Phoenix and Las Vegas, both due in the first half of 2026, were still in preparation.
September 2026: Cybercab rides began in Austin on September 3. The next day, NHTSA opened an audit of how Tesla certified the car, which has no steering wheel or pedals, as meeting federal safety standards. Tesla says it self-certified the Cybercab, and WardsAuto reported that it had not applied for an exemption.

Tesla did launch robotaxis in 2025, but in two metro areas and with employees on board, not the driverless network across several cities that Musk had described. The Cybercab is now on the road. Scale is the next test.

Sources

Subscribe to Weekly Insights

Get weekly insights on AI, SEO, and Growth Marketing delivered to your inbox. No spam, just the good stuff.

Prefer not to subscribe? Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn for the same insights and to connect