Many in the Tesla and electric vehicle (EV) community have eagerly awaited the company’s rollout of a driverless ride-hailing service, and a few recent developments suggest that the company may be considering multiple U.S. cities for early pilot programs.
Tesla is in talks with Austin, Texas officials about rolling out early pilot programs for its self-driving robotaxis as early as next year, as reported by Bloomberg earlier this month, and echoing CEO Elon Musk’s previous aims to launch commercial robotaxis in 2025. As detailed in emails acquired by the publication through public record requests, a Tesla employee has already been discussing the deployment of such fleets since at least May, though the company has also been considering pilot deployment in other Texas cities.
“Tesla is still working to strategically find a city within Texas to deploy… The city of Austin is obviously on our roadmap, but has not yet been decided where we will deploy first as we have many options available,” wrote an employee in one email from November.
The report also said that Tesla reached out to the city of Austin ahead of its October 10 “We, Robot” event, during which it unveiled the Cybercab, and the employee expressed hopes to meet safety expectations in the city of Austin, along with training first responders on how to interact with autonomous vehicles.
Earlier this month, Tesla held an event at its Gigafactory in Austin to help train first responders on its autonomous vehicle technology, though the employee said it wouldn’t yet be used on public roads and would let officials know of any changes to that.
Tesla’s initial ride-hailing pilots could also target California, with internal tests already underway
During the company’s Q3 earnings call in October, Elon Musk also said that employees in the Bay Area, California were already testing ride-hailing services internally. Using the company’s development app, Tesla employees can already request rides and be taken to anywhere in the Bay, according to the CEO.
Both Texas and California cities make sense for Tesla’s initial rollout of commercial robotaxi services, especially given that Musk also said the company aims to debut ride-hailing services and “Unsupervised” Full Self-Driving (FSD) approval in both of these states in 2025, dependent upon regulatory approval. Musk also said that the current internal ride-hailing tests in the Bay Area utilize safety drivers initially, though it isn’t required to do so.
Watch Tesla’s FSD v13.2 navigate away from park in a tricky situation
READ MORE: Tesla is ramping its Cybercab testing sessions at Giga Texas
Earlier this month, a Deutsche Bank report noted that Head of Investor Relations Travis Axelrod said also said Tesla plans to utilize teleoperation during initial rollout of autonomous ride-hailing efforts, as a safety and redundancy measure. This will likely play a role wherever the company first deploys commercial ride-hailing efforts.
Tesla also teased a ride-hailing mobile app in its Q1 Shareholder Deck earlier this year, showing a summon button to order ride-hails, an estimated wait time, climate controls for during the ride, navigation details, and even the ability to select and cycle through music or other media options.
Credit: Tesla
The mobile app avatar showed a Model Y, highlighting the ability for Tesla’s other vehicles to be eligible for ride-hailing operations through the Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) program, which is available to any owner who purchases the software through a subscription or one-time purchase.
Tesla Cybercab, Waymo and commercial robotaxis
We also learned in October that the Cybercab features a large touchscreen, in addition to excluding a steering wheel or pedals. You can catch our first ride in the Cybercab below, as captured during Tesla’s October 10 “We, Robot” event in Southern California.
?: Our FULL first ride in the @Tesla Cybercab pic.twitter.com/6gR7OgKRCz
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
Both Texas and California make sense as locations Tesla would deploy early ride-hailing services, especially given its Fremont factory, Palo Alto engineering headquarters, and its competitor Waymo, which already operates paid driverless ride-hailing in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Although Tesla isn’t expected to enter production with the Cybercab until 2026, the company’s other vehicles could be used to operate commercial self-driving at some point, though it also faces multiple competitors aiming to deploy these services.
Meanwhile, Waymo, the commercial robotaxi company backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has already been operating paid driverless ride-hailing in San Francisco since last year, and it has expanded services to Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona throughout this year. This week, the company said it’s now giving over 150,000 paid driverless rides per week.
Amazon owns the driverless ride-hailing company Zoox, which has recently also gained some ground in deploying commercial self-driving ride-hailing vehicles in the Bay Area.
With General Motors (GM) recently announcing the end of its self-driving arm Cruise, one less future competitor remains for Tesla in the commercial robotaxi space. Musk joining the administration of incoming President Donald Trump is also widely expected to accelerate regulation efforts in the rollout of self-driving technology, though the urgency of the emerging market is quickly becoming clearer.
Still, Musk and Tesla supporters have argued that the company’s FSD will be more scalable than companies like Waymo utilizing geo-mapping efforts, due to its AI neural network model being trained on video footage from real-time drivers across the company’s ownership network. With added safety measures like teleoperation and safety drivers in its early rollout of commercial robotaxi services, Tesla may yet be able to gain enough public and regulatory trust to start deploying these services in the coming months.
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
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Tesla is showing us that Cybercab mass production is well underway
Tesla’s Cybercab drives itself off the Gigafactory Texas line in a striking new production video.
Tesla has provided a first look from inside a production Cybercab as it drove itself off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. The video footage, posted on X, opens on the factory floor with robotic arms and assembly equipment visible through the Cybercab windshield, and follows the car through a branded tunnel marked “Cybercab”, before autonomously navigating itself to a holding lot.
The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas production line on February 17, 2026, with Musk writing on X, “Congratulations to the Tesla team on making the first production Cybercab.” April marked the official shift to volume production. The Giga Texas line is being prepared to produce hundreds of units per week, with 60 units already spotted on the Gigafactory campus earlier this month.
Purpose-built for autonomy
Cybercab in production now at Giga Texas pic.twitter.com/Y9qG3KyWBa
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 23, 2026
The Cybercab was first revealed publicly at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 pre-production units gave attendees rides around the studio lot. Musk said he believed the average operating cost would be around $0.20 per mile, and that buyers would be able to purchase one for under $30,000. The two-seat design is deliberate. Musk noted that 90 percent of miles driven involve one or two people, making a compact two-passenger vehicle the most efficient configuration for a fleet-scale robotaxi. Eliminating rear seats also removes complexity and cost, supporting that sub-$30,000 target.
Tesla’s annual production goal is 2 million Cybercabs per year once several factories reach full design capacity. The Cybercab has no steering wheel, no pedals, and relies entirely on Tesla’s vision-based FSD system. What the video shows is the first evidence of that system working not as a demo, but as a production reality, driving itself off the line and into the world.
🚗 Our first ride in Tesla Cybercab last October: pic.twitter.com/kGqIqgJPRn https://t.co/BITCXFhbVd
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2025
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla is showing us that Cybercab mass production is well underway
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
