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’s two recently-defunct flagship models, the Model S and Model X, are getting a big upgrade, according to the company’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy.
Older Hardware 3 Model S and Model X vehicles have been the last major holdouts in Tesla’s Full Self-Driving v14 Lite rollout, and that wait now appears to be ending.
Tesla brings closure to flagship ‘sentimental’ models, Musk confirms
At Tesla’s Cybercab launch, AI chief Ashok Elluswamy told Ryan McCaffrey that he thought the S and X build “was supposed to go out last week.” Evidently, Elluswamy expects the suite to be rolled out to those HW3 Model S and Model X very soon:
For my @Tesla friends – and specifically Model S & X owners with HW3 who are waiting on FSD v14 Lite – I spoke to @aelluswamy at the Cybercab launch, & when I asked for an ETA on v14 Lite for S/X owners, he said, “Oh, I thought it was supposed to go out last week.”
So: soon! 🙌
— Ryan McCaffrey (@DMC_Ryan) September 7, 2026
Those cars are not the current Model S and Model X, which already ship with Hardware 4. They are the pre-refresh flagships built around Tesla’s older Autopilot computer, often called HW3 or AI3.
Tesla stopped putting that computer in new vehicles years ago, which is why owners treat these S and X cars as a closed generation. Model 3 and Model Y vehicles on the same computer began receiving v14 Lite in late June 2026 and saw a wider North American expansion in July. South Korea followed as an early international market. The S and X versions of the same software never joined that wave.
v14 Lite is Tesla’s way of squeezing the current v14 driving stack onto hardware that cannot run the full AI 4 model. The company describes the process as distillation: behaviors learned on the newer computer, including reinforcement learning and offline models, are compressed so the older chip and cameras can use them as a guide.
Early descriptions put the distilled network at roughly 15 percent of the original size. The result is still supervised Level 2 driving. Tesla has been clear that HW3 cannot support unsupervised Full Self-Driving or robotaxi operation because of memory and bandwidth limits.
The feature list is what made the wait so frustrating for S and X owners, as plenty of new features are to be shipped with it.
Official notes for the first Lite build, firmware 2026.20.5.1, added parking, unparking, and reversing; arrival options for a parking lot, street, driveway, or curbside; speed profiles that stay available at all times; and start-from-park engagement. Tesla also claimed better handling of merges, forks, pedestrians, traffic lights, and cut-ins, plus fewer false slowdowns and smoother lane centering.
A mid-July follow-on build, 2026.20.6.10, added more of the Hardware 4 interface, including a standalone Self-Driving app and the ability to start a trip from Park without a brake-pedal confirmation.
Elluswamy called that version the one “likely going to wide release.”
That wide release already reached most other HW3 cars in the United States and Canada. International timing still depends on regional validation and regulatory approval. For S and X owners, the remaining work appears to be model-specific validation rather than a new software stack.
There is no official Tesla changelog or build number for those two models yet, only Elluswamy’s offhand timeline. Some HW3 drivers who already have Lite report large gains over v12.6; others have described new indecision or phantom braking. The next test will be whether the same software lands cleanly on the older flagships that have waited the longest.
Yesterday, we reported on Tesla Cybertruck getting some major adjustments from a manufacturing standpoint in an effort to make the all-electric pickup more cost-effective, more reliable, more serviceable, and more easily produced.
Tesla Cybertruck engineer reveals new changes in ‘constantly evolving’ pickup
One of those changes was the addition of a self-reinforcing polypropylene aero shield that sits underneath the truck. Previously, Tesla utilized aluminum for this, but the self-reinforcing polypropylene was more durable while also being cheaper and lighter.
Tesla has revealed another small change it made to the Cybertruck, and it has to do with the side repeater cameras.
Tesla does not wait for a new model year to improve its vehicles. On September 8, Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill posted side-by-side photos of an updated side repeater camera housing now rolling off the line at Gigafactory Texas.
The triangular camera pod mounted on the front fender looks almost identical at first glance. A closer look reveals a revised contour that uses the air already flowing around the truck to keep the lens clearer in rain and road spray.
The side repeater camera was updated – the version on the left is the newer part which uses passive geometry to create airflow disturbance that better keep water off the lens while driving. No cost penalty, just pure vision improvement. pic.twitter.com/wAbXtcL1Jf
— Wes (@wmorrill3) September 8, 2026
The side repeater cameras sit in an exposed position on the Cybertruck’s angular stainless-steel body.
In wet weather, they readily collect water droplets that can degrade the image Autopilot and Full Self-Driving use for lane changes and blind-spot monitoring. Early production trucks sometimes left owners wiping lenses by hand or accepting temporary restrictions on driver-assistance features.
Tesla has added washers to cameras on certain other models and on Cybercab prototypes, but those active systems add cost, complexity, and extra potential leak points.
The new housing solves the problem with passive geometry. Subtle changes in the surround create localized airflow disturbances as the vehicle moves. Those eddies physically push water droplets away from the optical surface. Morrill called the result “pure vision improvement” achieved at “no cost penalty.” Once the production mold is updated, every subsequent part costs the same as the original.
The advantages compound quickly. Clearer cameras in rain improve the reliability of driver-assistance features precisely when they are needed most. The design consumes no extra energy and introduces no new failure modes.
New Cybertrucks built after the tooling changeover receive the updated part automatically. Some owners of trucks delivered as late as June 2026 have already confirmed they received the revised housing. Retrofit questions have appeared in replies, and the cameras appear electrically compatible, though Tesla has not announced an official service program.
A few millimeters of reshaped housing will not make headlines the way a new battery pack does, but these changes are incremental and increase the Cybertruck’s effectiveness as a vehicle over time.
This improvement illustrates how Tesla continues to refine the Cybertruck after volume production began. Better wet-weather vision, zero added cost, and no extra hardware add up to a meaningful gain in everyday usability and safety.
Tesla is rolling out a new version of its Full Self-Driving suite to some owners that comes with the massive addition of a safety feature.
Tesla is rolling out Automatic Collision Evasion with the 2026.27.6 Software Update, which started rolling out to some vehicles last night. We received the update, along with Full Self-Driving v14.3.9, as well as v14.2 Lite, which has identical release notes as the previous version and seems to have some refinements and improvements in behavior and performance.
🚨 Tesla FSD v14.3.9 is rolling out as well as 2026.27.6 which includes Automatic Collision Evasion
Brand new safety features from a software update. My Tesla gets better everytime I get one of these pic.twitter.com/ctrMiQXWhM
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) September 8, 2026
However, most of the attention has fallen on the Automatic Collision Evasion feature, which we covered in an article last week.
The function will activate Full Self-Driving to “try to keep your vehicle safe and then continue driving. It can engage in the following situations while you are driving manually:
- Scenario 1: A frontal collision is imminent and braking alone may not avoid it.
- Scenario 2: Your vehicle detects that you are not sufficiently attentive to the road (for example, reaching toward the back seat), or that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) may have been unintentionally disengaged.”
Essentially, FSD will take over when the vehicle determines you are not paying sufficient attention or are heading toward a potential collision. The addition of this feature is incredibly useful as distracted driving is a major issue in today’s world.
Along with the new safety feature is Tesla FSD v14.3.9, which has no additional release notes compared to the previous version, but in my first drives, my first impression is that operation is great, and parking is still sort of a pain point.
Just took a 15-mile round trip to the gym and back
Pretty on par with what FSD is nowadays – really good. Not enough time to see what’s good and what’s bad, but these first rides on any version feel shockingly good. They’re all pretty identical https://t.co/WN1qTg4bhE
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) September 9, 2026
Additionally, Tesla v14.2. Lite has arrived. A great review of that is available here:
— Zack (@BLKMDL3) September 9, 2026
The addition of an Automatic Collision Evasion feature is similar to that of other collision avoidance systems that are used by companies like Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. These programs typically utilize radar and camera sensors to apply emergency brakes autonomously, though evasive steering in a manual driving mode is pioneered primarily by Tesla’s newest addition.
Tesla’s two defunct flagship models are getting a big upgrade
This tiny Tesla Cybertruck adjustment has big advantages
