Tesla still hasn't talked to state robotaxi regulators

Tesla still lacks approval to operate autonomous vehicles in California amid CEO Elon Musk seemingly confirming reports saying the company had postponed its highly anticipated robotaxi launch.

Some industry experts aren’t holding their breath for the rescheduled date, either.

Both the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Department of Motor Vehicles told The Examiner on Monday that Tesla has not applied for a driverless-testing permit or a deployment permit.

The company only owns a DMV permit to test its autonomous vehicles in the state with human drivers present, the easiest to acquire of the agency’s AV permits. A DMV spokesperson said that Tesla last reported using its permit in 2019.

The company’s autonomous vehicle was originally slated to be unveiled Aug. 8. But Bloomberg reported last week that the date has been pushed to October .

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to confirm the postponement Monday in a post on X, the social-media platform he owns. Replying to a user, Musk wrote that he “requested what I think is an important design change to the front, and extra time allows us to show off a few other things.”

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

NBC News reported in April — shortly after Musk announced plans for the Aug. 8 rollout — that Tesla hadn’t contacted state regulators . California officials said Monday that, with less than a month until that scheduled date, they still hadn’t heard from the company.

Billy Riggs, a University of San Francisco autonomous-vehicle expert, said he and other industry analysts were skeptical from the start about the original August launch.

“I never believed that first date,” he told The Examiner.

Riggs said he also doubted that October is any more realistic. In fact, he said it could be “years” before Tesla’s robotaxis can operate in the streets of San Francisco — or elsewhere — without drivers.

It’s unclear whether Musk plans to eventually experiment with Tesla robotaxis in San Francisco, which has emerged as one of the nation’s top testing sites for the technology. Musk has frequently bashed The City publicly, including as recently as Monday .

“There are some big technological challenges that they have to overcome between now and the delayed promise date,” Riggs said. “I think the market has reason to be skeptical that this is a real thing that Tesla can deliver on.”

The major hurdle for Tesla, Riggs said, is that the company is attempting to build its robotaxis with different hardware than other robotaxi-only firms like Waymo , Cruise and Zoox .

Riggs said Tesla is installing cameras into its robotaxis so the vehicles can understand how fast vehicles are moving in the space around them. On the other hand, most self-driving car companies program spatial awareness using a technology called lidar, which uses low-powered lasers that bounce back off surrounding objects.

“Tesla's trying to do all that with cameras, and it's a lot more of an estimation than the data that companies like Waymo, Cruise and Zoox are getting,” he said.

Riggs maintained that it’s “100% possible” for Tesla to build its technology without lidar. But that means the process is bound to take longer.

“It might be a while,” he said. “It's probably going to have to be a retrofitted version of the vehicles out there on the road, or a new vehicle type with some additional software to provide the redundancies that are expected with self-driving technology.”

Riggs speculated that the ambitious launch date could be Musk trying to ensure Tesla's stock prices would remain steady, rather than a realistic expectation.

Riggs mentioned that one advantage Tesla has is that its standard vehicles already use advanced driver-assistance system technology, giving the company a lot of data on which it can base its robotaxi design. But the feature, which the company controversially named "Full Self-Driving" despite the fact the function still requires driver control, has also received raft of criticism. The National Highway Traffic Administration is investigating whether Tesla’s recall of more than 2 million vehicles last year adequately fixed safety issues with the company’s autopilot feature.

Tesla relocated its headquarters to Austin, Texas, after moving from Palo Alto in 2021, but it continues to have a strong Bay Area presence. Its Fremont factory remains one of the company’s biggest U.S. manufacturing sites.