Tesla won back some investor confidence by forecasting a jump in vehicle sales next year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the electric vehicle maker will launch driverless ride-hailing services for the public in California and Texas next year, a claim that could face significant regulatory and technical challenges.
“We think we will be able to enable driverless Teslas doing paid rides next year,” Musk said on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call. He added that Tesla currently offers an app-based ride-hailing service to employees in the San Francisco Bay Area.
His statement builds on a pledge he made at Tesla’s robotaxis unveiling two weeks ago, in which he said he hoped to introduce “unsupervised” self-driving in some Tesla vehicles in 2025. The company’s shares fell sharply after it revealed no business plan for the robotaxi at that event.
However, on Wednesday, Tesla won back some investor confidence by forecasting a jump in vehicle sales next year.
In California in particular, the company will face difficulty securing the permits needed to provide fully autonomous rides to paying customers.
Alphabet’s Waymo, which offers paid rides in autonomous vehicles in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as well as Phoenix, Arizona, spent years testing for millions of miles before receiving its first permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates ride-hailing services.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the state, told Reuters that Tesla last reported using its autonomous vehicle testing permit in 2019. That permit requires a safety driver. The agency said the company does not have a driverless testing permit and has not applied for one. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. For its ride-hailing service in the Bay Area for employees, the CPUC said Tesla does not need a permit because employees are not considered passengers. At Tesla’s robotaxi event on Oct. 10, Musk unveiled a two-seater, two-door “Cybercab” without a steering wheel and pedals that would use cameras and artificial intelligence to navigate the streets. On Wednesday, he acknowledged potential difficulties in California, saying, “It’s not something we completely control,” but he added “I would be surprised if we don’t get approval next year.” Ross Gerber, a Tesla shareholder and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, said “dealing with regulators is a very difficult process” and no one should think of it as “a walk in the park.”
Texas has far fewer regulatory requirements for autonomous vehicles than California, but companies often test for months or years before launching paid services.
Rules for deploying autonomous vehicles are largely left to individual states. Musk said on the call that “there should be a national approval process for autonomy.”
Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system, called Full Self-Driving (FSD), which is the basis for Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions, has faced questions from regulators.
Last week, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD after four reported collisions, including a fatal accident scheduled for 2023.
Still, the idea of ​​Tesla rolling out a robotaxi fleet sent shares of ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft down 2.3% in post-market trading.
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