Owners of Tesla cars will be able to add their vehicles to the company’s robotaxi network sometime next year, Elon Musk said on the company’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, potentially allowing hundreds of thousands of customers to make money by remotely renting out their cars as self-driving cabs.
“I’d say confidently next year,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla, said on the call. “I’m not sure when next year, but confidently next year.”
The move would mark a major expansion of the company’s robotaxi network, which officially launched last month in Austin with just a handful of self-driving vehicles that Tesla directly owns and operates. Tesla is trying to catch up with industry leader Waymo, whose fleet of self-driving robotaxis ferry paying customers in numerous U.S. cities.
Musk noted that the Tesla team hasn’t “thought hard” about the details of adding cars that it doesn’t directly own to the robotaxi service, and was still primarily focused on safety in Austin, where it debuted operations in June with a safety driver in the passenger seat. “We need to make sure it works when the vehicles are fully under our control,” he said.
Tesla reported that revenue in its most recent quarter fell 12% year-over-year to $22.5 billion, the EV company’s worst performance in at least a decade. The company ascribed the decline to an ongoing slump in vehicle deliveries and falling prices (trends that were not helped by Musk’s involvement in partisan politics) as well as declining revenue from environmental credits.
Musk has suggested that Tesla would eventually incorporate Tesla EVs owned by its customers into the broader robotaxi network for several months now, raising the idea that individuals would be able to rent out their own cars and eventually even manage their own fleets. Besides the technological aspect of such a plan, it’s unclear how regulatory and liability issues might come into play. And, as of now, Tesla still has yet to fully remove safety drivers from the vehicles that it owns and operates on its fledgling robotaxi service. For its initial Austin rollout, Tesla has had someone sitting in the passenger seat at all times. Tesla has gradually expanded its service radius in Austin (a map shared by Tesla online last week depicts the latest robotaxi service area in a distinctly phallic shape) and Musk said the company plans to expand it further in a couple weeks time.
While Tesla’s robotaxi service is currently only available to invitees including social media influencers who regularly post about the company, and not the general public, Musk laid out lofty expansion plans for the robotaxi service on Wednesday’s earnings call, saying that Tesla was seeking regulatory permission to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida.
“As soon as we get the approvals and we prove our safety, then we’ll be launching autonomous ride hailing in most of the country, and I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” he said.
So far, there have been no major safety episodes in Austin since the launch of the robotaxi service, Tesla’s CFO said on the call. Teslas have driven 7,000 autonomous miles thus far since June, he said.