Will it be possible for a non Tesla employee to ride in a fully autonomous Tesla vehicle in California by the end of 2026?
Has to be a paid service that non Tesla employees can use. Has to be in a car not owned or leased by the rider. Has to be a point to point ride of at least 1 mile. Has to be on public roads in a city. Hailing app could be third-party, but car guidance/self-driving must be handled by Tesla.
Boring company tunnels don’t count.
Update 2025-03-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Safety Driver Clarification:
Rides that involve a safety driver in the vehicle will not count as fully autonomous.
Only rides with no human intervention in control (i.e., without a safety driver) will meet the criteria for a valid Robo-Taxi service.
Update 2025-07-28 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has clarified the resolution criteria with the following points:
A service with a waitlist or that is invite-only will count, as long as riders are not Tesla employees.
To be considered "offering the service," there must be a significant scale of operation. The creator has proposed a threshold of 50,000 rides per week in California. A single ride or token presence will not be sufficient.
Update 2025-07-28 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has reinforced the resolution criteria regarding the scale of the service:
To resolve to YES, the service must be operating at a scale of at least 50,000 rides per week in California.
This threshold is being held firm and is benchmarked against Waymo's public launch figures in San Francisco.
Update 2025-07-28 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator has revised the scale required for the service to count for a YES resolution, based on a user's suggestion to use Waymo's earlier launch numbers as a benchmark.
The previously established threshold of 50,000 rides per week has been lowered.
The new proposed threshold is approximately 15,000 rides per week, based on Waymo's figures from September 2023.
1,000
3.00
@MuGoGonzalez If random people can sign up and get a ride, I don't see why not. They have 10-20 cars, obviously, there should be some limit on how many people can ask for a ride. Otherwise, you get thousands of people asking for real rides (or just for laughs), which you can not serve (which does not look good)
@MarkosGiannopoulos It does not seem like they're genuinely letting random people sign up or else they'd have more than 25 miles per day per car.
@WrongoPhD I've argued in some other areas that Tesla's system in Austin arguably doesn't count as "open to the public" but that wasn't the wording of this event, which just requires they riders not be "Tesla employees". So I think the weird fans-only waitlist thing probably counts for this event.
On the other hand: I also never described what 'offering the service' means. If they make their ride hailing app show all of LA as part of their ride hailing area, but there are no cars, they are not 'offering the service'. If they give exactly one ride to one non-tesla-employee, they are not 'offering the service'. My best idea is some minimum number of rides/week, since that's what tends to get reported. Waymo was doing 700k in california per month in Feb. I'd want to see maybe 50k rides per week in CA to say Tesla is 'offering the service'.
@DavidFWatson "50k rides per week in CA" - This seems like a very high bar. Maybe something comparable to Waymo's numbers when they first started their service?
@MarkosGiannopoulos Waymo first opened to the public in SF on June 25th 2024
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/06/waymo-one-is-now-open-to-everyone-in-san-francisco
Eyeballing July on this graph, that sure looks like 200k rides. 50k a week.
Plus, source is the CPUC, if Tesla launches in CA, we’ll get data from the same source.
@WrongoPhD Ok, we're actually back to the question of employees vs non-employees, my bad. So it looks like September 2023? So 70k/month -> 15k per week?