Tesla’s driverless Robotaxi has been seen in Austin for the first time, but it is followed by a posterior car with a driver.
CEO Elon Musk says now that Tesla aims to “preliminary” start his service on June 22.
Tesla is now planning to operate its own little internal fleet of vehicles with dedicated software optimized for a geo -fence area in Austin and supported by “Lots of telecommunications operation.”
The company has discussed the launch of its paid service in June, but as we reported, it started only officially the “test” phase earlier this week, according to Austin’s official site.
Musk admitted that Tesla first began testing the system without security drivers in late May.
In comparison, Waymo tested its system, which was already operating in other cities, for 6 months of security drivers and 6 months without security drivers before launching his service in Austin earlier this year.
Now a Tesla model y without driver was stained in Austin for the first time:
From the video we can see that another Tesla vehicle is pulling the driverless vehicle, probably with a remote that is ready to take control or activate a killing contact.
As we have previously reported, Tesla has built up a team of telecommunications operators to remotely control its vehicles when needed.
Just this week, days before the scheduled launch of the service, Tesla has laid a new job list for engineers to build a telecommunications system with as low latency as possible.
Having a subsequent car can solve the latency problem.
After sharing the video above, Musk emphasized that this is unmodified model YS, just like those that Tesla supplies to customers. This caused someone to ask when Tesla plans to deliver unattended self-driving to customers when he promised that every Tesla vehicle produced since 2016 would be able to do.
Musk did not confirm it, but he said that the custom software running on these vehicles has about 4 times more parameters than the current version (FSD V13) in customers’ vehicles and he could see that it was implemented in the customer’s fleet later in the year:
It is a new version of software, but will soon merge to the main branch. We have a more advanced model in the alpha phase that has ~ 4x params but still require a lot of polishing. It’s probably ready for implementation in a few months.
As we have previously reported, this naval installation in Austin is quite a moving of the target post for Tesla, which has promised unattended self -driving in all vehicles since 2016.
This service only works in a geo-fence area where Tesla optimizes its FSD software to work better, and it is supported by telecommunications operation, something that cannot be scaled to the customer’s fleet.
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I don’t know why Musk wants to emphasize that Tesla is using the same vehicles it supplies to customers as if it’s a huge advantage over Waymo.
We know that Tesla’s hardware approach is much cheaper than Waymo. It’s not new. The real question has always been about security and performance.
I can see that this program eventually helps FSD progress, but as you can see, Musk does not indicate that unattended self-driving in customer vehicles is achieved when the new customer version of FSD coming out of this custom software when the market.
Even if this 10x kilometer between release in the current version, which would be impressive, Tesla would still only be approx. 5,000 miles. It is behind the competition and nowhere in the vicinity of what is necessary for Level 4 that is not monitored self -driving.
At this point, I expect Tesla to begin to admit that HW4 will not support unattended self -driving in customer vehicles at the end of 2026.
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