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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said public rides of his company’s first robotaxi might be available as early as June 22 in the city of Austin, Texas.
Musk said on his social media platformX that the date could shift because the company is “being super paranoid about safety.”
Some X users reported that they were invited to be some of the first to use the robotaxi on its launch this weekend. The Cybercab, the name for Tesla’s robotaxi, had also been spotted near Austin, Texas, earlier this month. Euronews Next has reached out to Tesla to confirm whether the launch is still happening but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The launch could come despite a group of Democratic Texas lawmakers asking Tesla to delay the robotaxi debut “in the best interest of both public safety and building public trust in Tesla’s operations”.
Is the Cybercab ready?
Crijn Bouman, CEO of Rocsys, a company that develops service infrastructure for autonomous vehicles, told Euronews Next that Tesla’s potential launch is important because it “will emphasise that the robotaxi is real.”
“It will come with the realisation that… autonomous driving just works,” he said. “It’s difficult to say whether [Tesla is] ready or not, but everybody’s excited and for sure everyone will be watching”.
For Tesla’s launch to be successful, Bouman said the company will have to have not only the robotaxi ready but also all of the infrastructure around it.
That means scaling up to “1000” vehicles, a “couple dozen” service hubs to clean and charge the cars and finding regular maintenance services for them, he added.
The company, which used to “control the narrative” on autonomous vehicles, is now facing competition from Waymo, the first company in North America to scale up a robotaxi business, Bouman said.
“If the whole operation isn’t included, they won’t be close to Waymo at all,” he said, noting that Waymo Rideshare sends a safe, clean robotaxi to a pickup location in five minutes.
“We likely won’t see that on [Sunday]”.
Might not be enough to ‘turn the tide’ of public opinion
The Cybercab’s potential launch comes at a difficult time for Tesla as stocks have plummeted over the last six months withfactories and Cybertrucks being vandalised.
Tesla is also facing an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US after the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system was allegedly involved in multiple crashes, including one where a pedestrian was killed.
Bouman doesn’t believe that an eventual robotaxi launch will “turn the tide” of public opinion towards Tesla unless the company starts to be more transparent.
“You have to show that the service is actually working at scale… normally the bar is that a robotaxi has to be ten times more safe than a human driver to gain the trust of the public,” he said.
“[Tesla] has to show that [with] … a third party analysis on the data”.
