After years of waiting, the self-driving Tesla Cybercab is about to hit the roads. Elon Musk says it will happen in June.
Elon Musk recently told authorities in Texas that Tesla is ready to put the driverless Tesla Cybercab on the roads as early as June 2025. This is a significant statement from Tesla's CEO, who has been promising fully autonomous cars just around the corner for years.
Musk recently informed investors that Tesla will roll out "autonomous transportation services as a payment service" in Austin, Texas, in June.
The Tesla director stressed that "the proof is in the results" and that Tesla will launch unattended, self-driving cars as a paid service in the city.
This is reported by Automotive News .
However, this also raises the question of safety and legal liability. Tesla must be prepared to take on a significant risk by rolling out unproven, driverless technology on public roads.
Legal experts believe that it would place responsibility for any accidents directly on the manufacturer, in this case Tesla.
Musk claims that Teslas are already operating autonomously at the Fremont, California, factory, driving themselves from the assembly line to designated parking spaces. However, he admits that Tesla has not met previous self-driving car targets.
In 2019, Musk promised a million robo-taxis on the road by 2020. He has repeatedly promised self-driving Teslas over the course of a decade. Now he says those cars are “literally five to six months away.”
After the Austin test, Tesla plans to expand the network to larger markets in the US, including California, by the end of the year. However, this will first be done with existing Tesla models. The Cybercab model is not expected to go into production until next year.
Musk believes that Europe and China, despite stricter legislation, could have self-driving Teslas on the roads by the end of 2026.
He emphasizes that safety must be significantly higher than the average human driver, as any accident involving a self-driving vehicle will create major headlines.
Tesla will compete with Google-owned Waymo, which operates robotaxi services in several US cities.
Waymo recently announced that it plans to expand testing of its autonomous vehicle technology to over 10 new cities by 2025. But Waymo is not without its problems either. In any case, the cars are far from trouble-free. Read more about it here.
