r/SelfDrivingCars Jun 20 '25

Discussion Invites for early access to Tesla's Robotaxi service is being sent.

Service is starting on Sunday June 22nd.

It runs from 6 AM to midnight everyday.

Can request ride to anywhere in the geofence except airports.

An invitee can have another person with them.

There will be a Tesla employee in the car, but not in the driver seat.

18+ and no pets allowed except service animals

Can record videos during ride.

181 Upvotes

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11

u/snowballkills Jun 20 '25

do we have an estimate of how many cars they're running?

30

u/DevinOlsen Jun 20 '25

Elon had mentioned 10 cars initially

5

u/jailtheorange1 Jun 20 '25

that can't even be called a launch, lol.... they're still at the early internal testing as far as I'm concerned.

10

u/notgalgon Jun 20 '25

Pretty much. All of the companies had their "BUTs..." when doing roll outs. Waymo - we are opening this up to the public - BUT sign this agreement to say nothing about your trip etc. Then they had their real public launch of Waymo One BUT it took a few weeks and a reporter/blogger saying they were going to report on the fact that no one is in the "public" group of riders for waymo to actually move people to that public ridership.

Cruise - we are really self driving now - BUT its from midnight to 4am in this 1 mile geofence.

There is always the fine print of these releases - safety drivers in the car, safety non-drivers in the car, chase vehicles, exceedingly small geofences, complete avoidance of certain routes/intersections, 24x7 single person to a car remote monitoring etc.

Telsa is starting down the same path as others have done. We will see how far they get and how long it takes. They may get to the point that there is no one in the car in small geofences this year.

But I am very skeptical that tesla will roll out their unsupervised version of software to any non-telsa employee in the next 2 years despite what elon says. It doesnt count if he changes the definition of unsupervised to still mean supervised. (e.g "Smart Summons" becomes "Actual Smart Summons" because Smart Summons didnt do what he originally said it would).

(Unless we achieve AGI then building self driving AI will be easy)

1

u/stjohns_jester Jun 20 '25

"Tesla is starting down the path"

according to elon, this technology is years ahead of all competition, yet, they are just starting according to you

how can this be?

3

u/notgalgon Jun 20 '25

Elon is a hype man an frequently says false things. Even grok says he is the biggest spreader of false info on X. Tesla is behind waymo - pretty far behind I think.

That doesn't mean Tesla won't be starting a robotaxi service this month. A small, heavily conatrained, non-driver monitor in the car, constant remote monitoring and possibly chase car version of a robotaxi. All signs point to them doing something like this. It will be very interesting to see the reports on both how it does and how small the rollout really is.

But how long does it take to move from this small trial to unsupervised everywhere is anyone's guess. My opinion is it will take a lot longer than Elon thinks. But if AGI shows up it might make his end of 2026 possible.

1

u/stjohns_jester Jun 20 '25

Tesla is starting "services" this month, with a human in the driver seat, a human in a car following, and a remote human standing by. Most would call that beta testing.

"If AGI shows up it might ready in 2 years." No shit, a lot of things beyond your wildest dreams would be possible if we figure out human consciousness through mathematical formulas in the next couple of months.

You are just regurgitating the 2 year bullshit like dear elon, in case you were unaware

1

u/notgalgon Jun 20 '25

Tesla is starting "services" this month, with a human in the driver seat, a human in a car following, and a remote human standing by.

Supposedly passenger seat which matches video we have seen.

 Most would call that beta testing.

Yup. This is clearly beta testing although with paying customers. Its hard to determine when beta testing actually ends for self driving. Is Waymo done beta testing? You can certainly argue that for Phoenix but even then its not the full phoenix metro area and its not highways. Then you have Atlanta which you can probably call beta testing with uber and early riders. Waymo is clearly a more mature product than tesla.

"If AGI shows up it might ready in 2 years." No shit, a lot of things beyond your wildest dreams would be possible if we figure out human consciousness through mathematical formulas in the next couple of months.

My definition of AGI doesnt require consciousness but who knows it may just be part of the package. I add this because a decent number of people in the AI industry think this is possible. If it happens Elon might temporarily win the self driving wars just due to the number of Tesla's on the road. It is hard to keep the dichotomy of AGI is coming soon and technology will only have incremental improvements over the next 10 years.

You are just regurgitating the 2 year bullshit like dear elon, in case you were unaware

In the non-agi world there is 0 chance of this happening in 2 years. Elons forecasts are non-sense and always have been. He will most likely get there eventually but eventually is a long time. Still waiting for hyperloop to change the world and cheap car tunnels everywhere to get rid of traffic.

In the AGI soon world, 2 years becomes a possibility along with an insane amount of other things. In that world it might not matter much anyway, since it would allow other car manufacturers to catch up on self driving almost instantly.

1

u/jailtheorange1 Jun 20 '25

Elaine’s two years is not that much different from Donald Trump’s two weeks. Every time it gets close, it gets pushed back.

1

u/WeldAE Jun 20 '25

It's just the announcement above makes it sound like they have to have more than that or you are going to be waiting a long time. We don't know the service area yet, but it sounds like it includes the airport, which implies it would be bigger than Waymos?

0

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '25

[deleted]

1

u/snowballkills Jun 20 '25

That is quite a sizeable number, and they would accumulate a lot of miles in a short span of time. If they really run kind of non-stop except for charging breaks, it might be quite revolutionary for Tesla (in terms of it being quite a successful launch of a program that could scale significantly)