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.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
