Email exchanges between Tesla and California regulators obtained by Politico reveal a comical discrepancy between what Elon Musk is saying his Robotaxi services can do publicly, and what the automaker is actually telling authorities behind closed doors.
This week, Tesla launched a ride-hailing service in San Francisco, in what is being framed as an expansion of its Robotaxi efforts that started as an invite-only program in Austin, Texas last month, where it immediately began charging customers for rides.
Note that we say it’s a “ride-hailing service,” because Tesla hasn’t obtained all the necessary permits to operate a robotaxi service in California. The use of the term “robotaxi” is conspicuously absent in both the company’s and Musk’s messaging about the Bay Area roll-out.
Also, there’s this detail: Tesla’s not-a-robotaxis come with a human supervisor sitting in the driver’s seat, which is a step backward from its Austin program, which features a safety monitor sitting in the front passenger seat.
And for all of Musk’s boasts of deploying a million robotaxis by the end of next year, Tesla is in reality walking such a precarious tightrope with regulators that it scrambled to apologize for one of its employees merely suggesting in a social media post that the automaker would be operating unsupervised rides in Los Angeles this year. It only had permission to operate a “transportation service” with regular cars from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
“Please know that Tesla is aware of the various permitting requirements,” Casey Blaine, Tesla senior counsel of regulatory affairs, wrote in a groveling email to Miguel Acosta, the autonomous vehicle chief at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, per Politico. “We understand that drivered and driverless autonomous rideshare operations would require obtaining additional permits from both the DMV and the CPUC.”
Apologizing for the incident, Blaine went on to frame the Tesla program as more like a ride-hailing service like Uber, according to Politico, using strikingly different language from Musk’s public promises of a robotaxi service that would threaten the leader in the industry, Waymo. In a glaring admission, Blaine said Tesla would use supervised, Full Self-Driving software that’s “functionally the same” as the FSD available in regular Tesla cars. FSD is not capable of operating without a human behind the wheel, and is officially classified as driver assistance software.
To his adoring fans, however, Musk continued to keep up the charade — much to the chagrin of regulators. Before a July meeting with Acosta, Musk made a post on X saying that the Robotaxi service would come to the Bay Area “probably in a month or two,” and claimed that it was just “waiting on regulatory approvals.” But no recent applications had been submitted by the automaker, according to Politico. Before another meeting that month, Musk again boasted in an earnings call that he sought to launch a full-blown robotaxi service in the state by the end of year.
At other times, the automaker outright went behind regulators’ back. Ahead of the San Francisco launch, Tesla had insisted that it would take a “phased approach” beginning by limiting rides to Tesla employees, before gradually expanding to their friends and family, and eventually, the general public. It reiterated these intentions as recently as last Thursday.
Then on Friday, Business Insider reported that Tesla was jumping straight into inviting select Tesla owners into the program and charging them for rides — a clear violation of the agreed terms. CPUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper warned that Tesla can’t use an autonomous vehicle to transport the public whatsoever, regardless of whether it has a safety driver and whether it charges for rides.
In November, Acosta reached out to Tesla after Business Insider reporting previously came out about its secretive test driver program “Project Rodeo,” in which it allegedly instructed participants to purposely get the cars into perilous situations and only intervene at the last moment.
Tesla’s defense? That its cars weren’t autonomous enough to “implicate” the guidelines in its decade-old safety driver permit. “Rodeo drivers are trained to always and immediately intervene whenever they believe their vehicles may be about to perform a behavior that may create an unsafe situation for themselves and/or other road users,” Eric Williams, Tesla counsel of regulatory affairs, wrote in a letter to Acosta.
In short, Musk and Tesla are talking a big game to investors and its wide-eyed fans about how amazing its Robotaxis will be — but its private groveling with regulators suggests that it’s fibbing to at least one of those groups.
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