Tesla has officially applied for a permit to operate a ride-hailing service in California, but contrary to previous claims, it will use human drivers instead of fully autonomous robotaxis.
Last year, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would launch “unsupervised self-driving” in Texas and California by Q2 2025. However, many suspected this wouldn’t involve customer vehicles achieving true autonomy but rather a geo-fenced fleet with teleoperation support, similar to Waymo’s ride-hailing service.
Musk later confirmed that Tesla’s plan for Austin in June would follow this model. As a result, Tesla stopped discussing California, despite originally stating that both locations would launch simultaneously.
This shift in approach has been seen as Tesla “moving the goalposts” on its long-promised autonomous ride-hailing service.
Now, Bloomberg reports that Tesla has applied for a ride-hailing permit in California:
The electric vehicle manufacturer applied late last year for what’s known as a transportation charter-party carrier permit from the California Public Utilities Commission, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg. That classification means Tesla would own and control the fleet of vehicles.
However, this permit application is for a traditional ride-hailing service, similar to Uber, but using Tesla’s internal fleet rather than customer-owned vehicles.
Tesla has yet to apply for a permit to operate driverless vehicles:
In its communications with California officials, Tesla discussed driver’s license information and drug-testing coordination, suggesting the company intends to use human drivers, at least initially. Tesla is applying for the same type of permit used by Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s robotaxi business. While Tesla has approval to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California, it doesn’t have, nor has applied for, a driverless testing or deployment permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, according to a spokesperson.
Elon Musk has once again claimed that Tesla will achieve “unsupervised self-driving” in California by the end of the year, but he has made similar promises every year for the past decade.
Current data shows that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system achieves around 500 miles between critical disengagements. However, Tesla itself has stated that it needs to reach 700,000 miles per disengagement for the system to be considered safer than human drivers.
With such a significant gap still remaining, Tesla’s timeline for true autonomous driving remains uncertain.
