Tesla Owners Will Soon Be Able To Make Money While They Sleep With New Robotaxi Fleet, Musk Says

Tesla’s Elon Musk has announced that the company is gearing up to roll out its highly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, early next month, and owners can add their vehicles to the fleet to make money while they sleep.The service is expected to kick off with a fleet of only 10 vehicles, but the Tesla CEO said he expects the fleet to grow to 1,000 “within a few months.”“We have millions of cars that will be able to operate autonomously,” Mr. Musk said during a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s David Faber at Tesla’s Austin headquarters. “And I should say that it’s a combination of a Tesla-owned fleet and also enabling Tesla owners to be able to add or subtract their car to or from the fleet, so that existing Tesla owners will be able to earn money by adding their car to the fleet for autonomous use.”“And I think it’s maybe possible for Tesla owners to make more by allowing a car to be added to the self-driving fleet than it costs them in the lease,” he said. “That’s why I’d say I consider it to be sort of a business model. It’s similar to some combination of Airbnb and Uber. Just like Airbnb, you can rent out your spare bedroom or your house if you’re not using it and make money on it. And that’s what we expect Tesla customers to be able to do.”Following the Austin debut, Tesla plans to expand its robotaxi operations to Los Angeles and San Francisco, Mr. Musk said. The robotaxi vehicles will initially be the Model Y, equipped with Tesla’s forthcoming version of Full Self-Driving technology, known as FSD Unsupervised. The vehicles will operate without a human “safety driver,” though Tesla employees will monitor the fleet remotely.“We’ll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully, and as confidence grows, less of that will be needed,” Mr. Musk said.To begin with, Tesla’s robotaxis will operate within “geofenced” areas in Austin, meaning their routes will be carefully restricted. The measured approach is in contrast to other autonomous ride-hailing companies like Waymo, which already operates driverless commercial services across various American markets and conducts 250,000 paid trips weekly, according to a recent Alphabet earnings call.Mr. Musk has previously highlighted Tesla’s distinctive approach to autonomous vehicles, relying primarily on camera-based systems and artificial intelligence rather than incorporating costly sensors such as lidar and radar. “What will actually work best for the road system is artificial intelligence, digital neural nets, and cameras,” Mr. Musk said during the CNBC interview.While the robotaxi announcement reflects Tesla’s ambitious technological strides, Mr. Musk also addressed some of the challenges the company has faced. He acknowledged a 20 percent drop in Tesla’s automotive revenue during the first quarter of 2025, attributing it to factory retooling for the production of a refreshed version of the Model Y.“We can’t make cars if the factories are retooling. But we’ve seen a major rebound in demand at this point,” he said, but he did not provide specific figures.Tesla has also encountered political criticism, stemming in part from Mr. Musk’s affiliation with President Trump. He served as a key adviser to the president and implemented deep budget cuts across the federal government as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency.But Mr. Musk questioned the impact of his political dabbling on consumer decision-making regarding Tesla vehicles, saying, “When you buy a product, how much do you care about the political views of the CEO?”

Tesla Owners Will Soon Be Able To Make Money While They Sleep With New Robotaxi Fleet, Musk Says

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