Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed key launch dates for the company’s long-awaited robotaxi program, with the first public rides scheduled to begin on June 22 in Austin, Texas. If all goes according to plan, Tesla will also deliver its first fully autonomous vehicle on June 28—Musk’s birthday—marking a significant milestone for the automaker.
The announcement was made Tuesday on X, where Musk confirmed that the initial rollout will be limited and closely monitored for safety. “We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” he wrote.
The robotaxi pilot will begin with a small fleet, between 10 and 20 Model Ys, operating in a geo-fenced area of Austin. Tesla employees will remotely monitor the vehicles, and the system will initially avoid high-risk zones or complex driving scenarios.
On Tuesday, a Model Y robotaxi with a stylized “Robotaxi” logo was spotted driving through Austin streets without a safety driver, stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk, marking the first time we’ve seen a driverless Tesla on public roads.
Recently, Tesla was added to the city’s list of approved autonomous vehicle operators, with the company currently listed as being allowed to test its robotaxi, but not fully deploy them and charge customers for rides.
Autonomous Deliveries
Along with the tentative date for the robotaxi service launch, Musk also announced Tesla plans for a Model Y to autonomously drive from the end of the production line at Giga Texas directly to a customer’s home on June 28, well ahead of the company’s original schedule.
This delivery will be entirely driverless, using Tesla’s new version of Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.
Tentatively, June 22.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2025
We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.
First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.
FSD Unsupervised Details
This version of FSD is expected to include major improvements over what is currently available to the public. According to Musk, a more advanced alpha model with 4 to 4.5 times more parameters than current builds is in testing. It features optimized memory efficiency, real-time performance, and precise caching, though it will require full system retraining before deployment.
Tesla aims to integrate this software into the main FSD branch available to regular owners within the coming months.
Musk also clarified that while the software is different than the main branch, the hardware on the robotaxi Model Y vehicles is exactly the same as what is currently available to customers.
~4.5X increase in params should be ready for wide release later this year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2025
Super frugal use of memory bandwidth, caching exactly what is needed & squeezing microseconds out of everything are needed to maintain the frame rate.
And the whole system needs to be retrained.
