Riders paid a flat $4.20 to climb into a Tesla in Austin on Sunday, and for the first time nobody sat behind the wheel. Elon Musk announced the price on X that afternoon: “The @Tesla_AI robotaxi launch begins in Austin this afternoon with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee!”
Earlier in June, Musk had said the launch would “tentatively” happen on June 22. It did.
Not everyone could ride. Tesla gave the first trips to a select group of influencers, who took Model Y cars around a limited part of the city. The company reposted a handful of their videos. They show passengers getting in and out, and the car working through streets, rolling over speed bumps and steering around pedestrians. In one clip an employee sits in the passenger seat to keep an eye on things while the driver’s seat stays empty.
Musk thanked the teams behind it, calling the service the “culmination of a decade of hard work” and adding that “Both the AI chip and software teams were built from scratch within Tesla.”
Model Y now, Cybercab later
The Model Ys are a stopgap. Tesla plans to bring in its purpose-built Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals. Musk said production would start “before 2027.”
Tesla got here in steps. It first tested the service with employees in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a safety driver aboard. In May, Musk posted that Tesla had spent several days running self-driving Model Y cars on Austin public streets, no one in the driver’s seat, “with no incidents.”
A new permit rule in Texas
Texas is an easy place to start because it has few rules for driverless vehicles. That is about to change. On Friday, Governor Greg Abbott signed a law requiring autonomous vehicle services to hold a state permit before they operate. It takes effect Sept. 1.
Tesla is not alone in town. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, gives driverless rides in Austin through a partnership with Uber, and Amazon-owned Zoox drives its test fleet there.
