Tesla spent years selling its Full Self-Driving software, for as much as $15,000, with the promise that owners would be able to use that software to send their cars out as robotaxis to earn money when they’re not being used otherwise.

Just today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be charging a flat fee of $4.20 for rides in its highly-supervised “robotaxi”. But that brings up the question: if Tesla spent so many years promising that you could use your car to earn money, and it’s using its cars to earn money, then why can’t you?

Tesla’s autonomy efforts started long ago, with the relatively less capable Autopilot software which was first released to the public in 2015. Autopilot operated only on highways and required driver attention, but nevertheless was a groundbreaking driver assist system which was easy to use and more capable than most everything else on the road at the time.

Since then, most brands have implemented systems with similar “level 2” driver assist capabilities.

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But that wasn’t enough for Tesla, as it promised that the system would continually improve to the point where its cars would become fully autonomous, and capable of operation without any driver inside the vehicle at all.

Nearly ten years ago, Musk started the timeline, stating in late 2015 that Tesla would have fully autonomous vehicles about two years from then. He also said that you would be able to use Tesla’s “summon” feature to call your car from New York to pick you up in Los Angeles, again targeting around 2017/2018 for that capability to be rolled out.

Tesla soon upgraded its rhetorical ambitions, selling a different piece of software on top of Autopilot, which it calls “Full Self-Driving.” The idea was to pre-sell this software to Tesla owners (with a price that would only raise over time as the system got closer to launch – but that was another broken promise), and if you purchased it, you would be able to activate the software on your car when it’s ready.

All along, Tesla hailed that it was ahead of the field on self-driving efforts, largely due to the enormous amounts of data that it was collecting with millions of cars equipped with self-driving hardware (even though it double-charged some of those owners for hardware they already bought).

It said that, once self-driving is solved, the company would be able to simply flip a switch and enable the entire fleet to drive everywhere, without geofences, instantly with a simple software update.

Musk said in 2023 that this moment would be the “single biggest step change in asset value maybe in history,” echoing a previous moment when he said in 2019 that Tesla vehicles are “appreciating assets”.

The reason for this is because the cars would then be able to operate without a driver, which means they’d be able to accomplish new tasks without taking any of the owner’s time. You could send it to pick up your kids from school and not have to leave work early, or you could get it to grab a delivery for you, or any other number of ways that it would give you back time that you would otherwise have spent driving.

But even moreso, it could make you money. Tesla said it would start its own ride-hailing service, then called “Tesla Network,” and that owners would be able to send cars out, running their own autonomous taxi services while they’re at home, at work, or otherwise not using their car.

Needless to say, none of these promises have played out, despite them being made starting a decade ago.

But despite that, Tesla has already started making money from its system, it’s just not letting its customers who paid $15,000 make money from the system they were promised would be a financial boon overnight.

Tesla starts charging for autonomous taxi rides

Tesla’s much-awaited Robotaxi launch starts this afternoon in Austin. It’s a much more limited launch than one might have expected given the hype and the long, continually-pushed-back lead time, but some people will finally experience what it’s like to be picked up by a Tesla with nobody in the driver’s seat today

But it’s still not a full robotaxi – there will be a “safety monitor” in the front passenger seat, along with teleoperators for backup, geofencing (which Musk once said isn’t “real self driving”), limited operation times, potential weather limits, a user list limited to Tesla superfans, and only around 10 vehicles in the area. It will, however, count as “level 4” autonomous, if there truly is nobody operating the vehicle.

We’re looking forward to the first videos of the experience, which should be imminent whenever the launch does happen. The launch was previously scheduled for this morning, then noon, and now “this afternoon” as announced by Musk today (cutting it quite late, as if Tesla needs the first half of the day to finish preparations on a system that they’ve reportedly been testing for “several days”)

The announcement includes a mention of the fee that Tesla will be charging for this fledgling effort, in contrast with other driverless taxi services that have operated for some time before they started charging fees. Both Cruise and Waymo went through various stages of operation before they moved to public rides with fees, including safety drivers, employee-only limitations and so on.

But by the time they charged fees, they had been operating for some time with nobody at all in the vehicle, unlike Tesla’s first effort today (though both had a waitlist for the public to join the service, but your position in the waitlist was not determined by how nice you’d been to the company on twitter – for example, I used Waymo in a press preview period, and I didn’t have a minder in the car with me telling me that I had to be nice).

Today’s announcement by Musk shows that Tesla is charging a fee from day one, before the system is really self-driving, given the many limitations of this launch. The fee is set at $4.20 – an apparent reference to Musk’s many reported drug addictions.

So this raises the question: if Tesla’s service is good enough for it to charge money, good enough for Tesla to call it a robotaxi, good enough for Tesla to put up a whole page about it, where’s that software update and asset value increase Tesla owners were promised?

After all, this was supposed to happen instantly, delivered to the whole fleet, and not geofenced (except for the matter of regulatory approval – how’s that going for you, Elon?). That’s the story Tesla has always told, anyway.

Some will point out that this measured rollout of autonomous taxis makes more sense, as safety is paramount. This is obviously true, and is why other companies have focused on gradual rollouts. But if this is still just a test and isn’t full self-driving by Musk’s definition, then Tesla probably shouldn’t call it a robotaxi and probably shouldn’t charge for it.

Also, those other companies didn’t spend ten years selling a system, for up to $15k, promising the largest asset value increase in the history of the world. They didn’t say that you’d be able to summon your car across country to come get you. They didn’t claim to be robotaxis when there was a safety monitor in the front seat, and they didn’t continually hype up a launch that got pushed back the better part of a decade and is still being pushed back today, on launch day, as the hours tick on into “afternoon.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s mouth is still writing checks that Tesla owners can’t (yet?) cash, as just today he posted a clip of himself being interviewed last month, stating that “by the end of next year” (Elon! Play Freebird!) Tesla will have hundreds of thousands or millions of autonomous taxis on the road, making money for customers who purchased FSD.

So, Tesla owners get to wait, once again, until Tesla deigns to give them the crumbs they paid so much for and have waited so long for. The company will be happy to collect money itself in the interim – but you can’t. Thanks for the 15 grand.

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