Elon Musk launches Tesla robotaxi service in Austin with $4.20 flat fee

Despite empty pledges, promises continued. Last year in January, Musk said, “Next year, we will definitely have more than a million robots.”

Will you settle for 10 or 12?

Musk seems to be about to make his robotics vision a reality by testing a small self -driving team in Austin, Texas, which started on Sunday. However, it may take to reach one million years or more, although billionaire should be able to expand the service this year if the experimental offer in Austin is successful.

The risks cannot be higher, nor challenges.

While Musk was offered these promises “next year”, Waymo’s competition was busy spreading taxis without a driver in Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin and other cities using a different technology that allowed them to reach the market faster. I just completed a paid trip 10 million.

Provinces related to musk policy have harnessed the sales of Tesla. Configreated electric car makers with newly competitive models have stolen the market share. And investors on the brink of the abyss after wiping the shares worth $ 150 billion when Musk chose a battle on social media with an American president who supervises federal car organizations that could make Robotaxi Mollout more difficult. The arrow was recovered to some extent that Musk said that he regretted some of his statements.

Tesla shareholders have stood alongside Musk over the years because it challenged the possibilities by building a successful independent electrical compound company-the self-driving car is aside-and made it a lot of money in this process. A decade ago, Tesla shares were traded for about $ 18. The shares were closed on Friday at $ 322.

Musk looked cheerful on Sunday morning, as it was posted on X, “The launch of Tesla_ai Robotaxi begins in Austin this afternoon, where customers pay a flat fee of $ 4.20!”

The test begins modest enough. Tesla monitors vehicles remotely and puts a person in the passenger seat if there is a problem. The number of Teslas will also be small – only 10 or 12 vehicles – it will only pick passengers in a limited and geographical area.

Musk pledged that the service will quickly spread to other cities, as it eventually reached hundreds of thousands if not a million vehicles next year.

Some musk monitors in Wall Street are skeptical.

“How quickly expand the fleet?” Garrett Nelson, an analyst at CFRA. “We are talking, maybe dozens of vehicles in the beginning. They are very small.”

Seth Goldstein from Morningstar says that Musk is conducting classic musk: it is very very quickly.

“When anyone in Austin can download the application and use a roboty, that will be successful, but I don’t think this will happen until 2028,” he says. “The test will take some time.”

The tendency of musk to raise shares is high with a little known exaggeration among investors.

In 2018, Tesla told shares that he was “funded” to buy all their shares at a huge allowance and take the private company. But he not only lacked a written commitment by financiers, according to federal stock organizers who fined him, did not discuss the amount of the loan or other details with them.

Recently, I told Musk Cnbc in May that Tesla was suffering from a “great recovery” in the demand. A week later, the auto group in Europe announced that sales have decreased by half.

Musk is subjected to fire criticism for exaggerating the ability of the system used for its cars to drive itself, starting with the name. Full self -driving is a wrong designation. The system still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road because they may need intervention and control at any moment.

Federal highway safety organizers opened an investigation at FSD last year after several incidents, and the Ministry of Justice conducted its own investigation, although this situation is unknown. Tesla also faced lawsuits on this feature, some of which led to a settlement, and the other rejection. In one case, a judge against the prosecutors ruled, but only because they did not prove that the musk is “knowledgeable” made wrong statements.

Musk says that robots will work on an improved copy of full self -driving and taxi will be safe.

He also says that the service will be able to expand quickly throughout the country. His secret weapon: millions of owners of Tesla on the roads. He says that the software update through the air will soon allow them to transfer their cars to taxi without driver and start a side job while stuck in the office for eight hours or on vacation for a week.

“Instead of having your car in the parking lot, you can earn your car,” Musk said earlier this year. “You will be able to add or put your car to the fleet.”

Musk says that Tesla can also move quickly to spread taxis now because of his decision to rely only on the cameras for cars for transportation, unlike Waymo, which has followed a more expensive road by completing its cameras with the laser and radar.

“Tesla will be, I don’t know,” MUSK contemplates a phone conference with investors, “market share 99 % or something ridiculous.” Looking at the beginning of Waymo and the potential competition from Amazon and others, the dominant driver without this can be at hand.

But Dan Eve, an analyst at the Wedbush Securities and Big Musk, says MUSK may already be withdrawn due to Tesla’s ability to expand quickly. Even skepticals like Mooringstar’s Goldstein admit that Musk is sometimes doing things in the right quorum, amazingly.

He raised the auto industry by making people buy expensive electric cars, bring online internet service to rural areas, and recently, the Gee-WHIZ trick led from the uninhabited rockon on a platform on the ground.

“Maybe its timelines are not realistic, but he can develop future technical products,” says Goldstein.