EVWire brief: We’ve had enough breadcrumbs from Elon and elsewhere now to put together nearly all of the picture of Tesla’s robotaxi launch in June. I’ll try and go over all relevant questions below, add any thoughts we’ve missed in the comments.
What Teslas will launch as robotaxi first? Model Ys.
This is what Elon has said on the earnings call as well. They have not fully ruled out using any Cybercabs to my knowledge so there might be a small surprise hidden there, but unlikely. Our friend Ryan (@klwtts) already found one of the test vehicles as well:
Image: @klwtts
How many will launch as Tesla robotaxis? 10 Model Ys will launch.
Elon has said 10-20 in the earnings call before, but confirmed the number 10 for the first week (and then 1,000 robotaxis within a few months):
"Tesla will have 10 robotaxis on the road during the first week when it launches next month, then it will grow from there. We'll probably be at 1,000 robotaxis within a few months."
Is there a safety driver in the Tesla robotaxi? No safety driver.
Elon on CNBC: There will be NO safety driver in the driver seat when Tesla's robotaxi service launches in Austin next month. They will, of course, have teleoperators ready to take over as it both makes sense and is also mandatory.
Is Tesla robotaxi available in whole of Austin or geofenced? Geofenced at first.
Elon:
"We are actually going to deploy not to the entire Austin region, but only the parts that are the safest. So we will geofence it. It's not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident it will do well."
Is the Tesla robotaxi service available to anyone? Not at first.
If we’re to believe one of the latest analyst notes based on a meeting with head of IR at Tesla, then it will be invite-only at first. But Elon has also mentioned that the employees of Tesla have accessed the service already earlier.
Has Tesla been preparing, testing in Austin? Yes, for a months now.
Here’s what Elon said in the earnings call:
“There’s just always a convoy of Teslas just going all over to Austin in circles. I just can’t emphasize this enough. In order to get figure out these long tail things, it was one in 10,000 miles. Or one in 20,000 miles or one in 30. The average person drives 10,000 miles in a year.
So now try to compress that test cycle into a matter of, you know, a few months. That means you need a lot of cars doing a lot of driving to do in a matter of a month what would normally take someone a year."
Tesla’s video in late April gave us some more details about the testing — they had completed 1.5k trips and 15k miles of driving then in Austin and in San Fransisco Bay Area.
FSD Supervised ride-hailing service is live for an early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay Area.
We've completed over 1.5k trips & 15k miles of driving.
This service helps us develop & validate FSD networks, the mobile app, vehicle allocation, mission control &
— #Tesla AI (#@Tesla_AI)
4:28 PM • Apr 23, 2025
Also, per a recent Business Insider article (so take this one with a grain of lithium salt), Tesla reportedly has 300 test operators driving around Austin, Texas, to prepare for the June robotaxi launch.
Sidenote — from that video, you can also see Tesla will utilize the rear screen in-ride for service
And by the looks of it, you can also the rear screen to access all the stuff normally found in a Tesla, like videos, gaming, music, and more:
What’s next after Austin? San Francisco Bay Area. See above.
When will the Cybercab launch into service? Nobody knows.
There are quite a few Cybercab prototypes we’ve seen all around, which made their ways into the showrooms after being used on the 10/10 robotaxi event as actual autonomous chauffeurs. The Cybercab is scheduled to begin volume production in 2026, but we have also seen a wide array of Cybercab underbody gigacastings on the drone videos from Giga Texas.
Cybercab gigacastings. By Joe Tegtmeyer.
Fun fact — per Elon, the Cybercab will be built 6x faster than the Model Y. A Cybercab will roll off the production line every 5 seconds, vs the 33 seconds for the current Model Y.
When will Tesla reap the [financial] benefits of Robotaxi? Second half of 2026, per Elon:
Elon: “autonomy will start to move the financial needle for Tesla starting in the middle to second half of 2026. […] Once we can make it work in a few cities in America, we can make it work in any city in America."
Can the Tesla robotaxi be used for deliveries? Certainly, at one point. Elon, and Tesla, have both recently hinted towards the other-than-rides services of Tesla robotaxis, like package deliveries, and actually sending your car to run errands:
What is “Alicorn”? Alicorn is a mythical creature, an unicorn with wings. It is also confirmed as the internal codename for the robotaxi service.
How is the rest of the FSD doing?
Elon is also still certain that "Hundreds of thousands of Teslas in the US will be running Unsupervised FSD in 2026,” and also in the earnings call said the Unsupervised FSD will be available on personally owned Teslas in several US cities by the end of 2025.”
Tesla drivers have now cumulatively driven over 3.6 billion miles on FSD (Supervised) as of the end of March, up from 2.9 billion at the end of December. That's an average of 8.88 million miles per day.
DIG DEEPER: Find the latest news on Tesla in our TESLAWIRE feed.
Did we miss anything important about the robotaxi launch? What do you think of the Tesla robotaxi launch? Let me know in the comments. 👇
