Musk Says Tesla Plans June Launch Of Robo Taxi Service
The billionaire said the company will make public safety a priority, because accidents involving autonomous cars generate 'headlines'
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the EV carmaker will debut a paid robo taxi service in Texas this June.
"We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June," Musk said on an earnings call on Thursday.
"We'll be scrutinizing it very carefully to make sure there's not something we missed," he said.
His company is playing catchup with Waymo, which is owned by Google-parent Alphabet and has already launched a self-driving taxi service in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and plans to expand to Miami.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating roughly 2.4 million Tesla vehicles over its Full Self-Driving technology after a series of crashes, including at least one fatality.
Musk, who is a top adviser to President Donald Trump and heads up the DOGE panel on government reform, said public safety will be a top concern for the service.
"The standard has to be very high, because the moment there's any kind of accident with an autonomous car—this immediately gets worldwide headlines, even though about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the U.S., and most of them don't even get a mention anywhere," he said, PC Mag reported.
"If somebody scrapes a shin with an autonomous car, it's headline news," Musk said.
© Copyright IBTimes 2024. All rights reserved.
- MOST POPULAR IN Technology
