Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, has confirmed that the company has been testing self-driving Model Ys on the streets of Texas ahead of the company’s official Robotaxi service launch in June.
In an X post, Musk confirmed that the Model Y vehicles have been testing in Austin, Texas, without anyone in the driver’s seat.
This has occurred ahead of the company’s original schedule, which was expected to be around late June.
In a further revelation, Musk has also stated that Tesla’s vehicles will be self-driving from the factory to a customer’s door.
On the back of this post, a fan of Tesla’s upcoming service asked if the service will be open to the public by the end of June, to which Musk replied: “Sure”.
This news comes weeks after it was reported in April that newly produced Model Y and Cybertruck vehicles could drive for over 3 kilometres, right after coming off the production line.
Although those roads around the Austin factory were not opened to the public but still highlighted the intelligence of the full-self-driving software’s growing capabilities to allow Tesla to remove drivers from the car for delivery purposes.
That could also have been part of the testing Tesla needed to do in preparation for the unsupervised service it aims to operate in the streets of Texas next month.
In May, Tesla shocked many by releasing a video of its supervised full self-driving software, which showed a Tesla Model 3 driving on Australian roads without any driver input during its trip.
During that trip, a black Model 3 sedan is seen with a driver entering the destination in Melbourne before the car drives there itself, without any intervention. It even undertook the complex hook turn to turn right on a street with trams on it.
As previously mentioned, Tesla will launch its Robotaxi service first in Austin, Texas in June. That will be followed by a service in California later this year ahead of a bigger rollout in the US in 2026.
The news of Tesla’s Model Y testing without a driver and the upcoming driverless customer deliveries are significant steps in bringing unsupervised, full-self-driving cars to the streets of the US and, on a more global scale, in the near future.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.