Tesla Launches Robotaxi in Tampa & Orlando, + Big Change Coming to FSD!

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Tesla Robotaxi Service in Florida

Tesla has now launched its robotaxi service in Tampa and Orlando, Florida. Service is pretty limited right now, but we have someone on our team who lives right next to the service area and will report back on using it once he has that opportunity. Tampa is one of the most dangerous cities in the country when it comes to road safety, so if robotaxi deployment from Tesla, Waymo, and others can help with that, great — but there’s a long way to go, and I can’t imagine robotaxis take over most of that driving anytime in the coming decade or more.

Reportedly, both of the initial geofenced areas target tourist use. But, frankly, no tourist comes to Florida without a car or a rental car. Orlando is the #1 city in the world for rental cars. So, if these are tourist focused, they will likely be used more as a fun “try this out” kind of thing than for actual transportation needs.

A very small number of vehicles have been deployed where Tesla already operates its robotaxi service, making it hard to get a car in a reasonable amount of time, so we’ll see if that’s also a problem in Tampa and Orlando or how long it takes to not be a problem.

On X/Twitter, where this was announced, there’s a lot of criticism from people saying this is a very small, limited area for robotaxi deployment and that Tesla doesn’t have enough cars for these robotaxi deployments to be actually useful. Below are a few examples, or here’s a super critical one that includes NSFW language.

Well, we’ll see how things go there. Note that Tesla also launched limited robotaxi service in Miami earlier this year.

Cybercab Starlink

It’s been announced this week that the Tesla Cybercab will include Starlink V5. Tesla Head of AI Ashok Elluswamy also provided some insight into why it’s being integrated (beyond boosting SpaceX business of course): “It is still not required for safe operation of the vehicle. Connectivity is primarily meant for navigation, customer service and, in general, fleet management.”

FSD Learning Your Preferences

This is something I thought Tesla was going to be doing about a decade ago. At last, though, it is happening, and it is a pretty big change. Tesla FSD (“Full Self Driving”) is finally going to start remembering your preferences when driving. As Elon Musk said it, “The car will start to remember your specific interventions and match each person’s individual preferences.” This was in response to someone complaining about FSD leaving the carpool or express lane and then getting stuck in traffic.

Presumably, this is all GPS based and will just remember exactly what you did/preferred in that location, just like Tesla has had automatic air suspension and mirror-folding capabilities GPS-based for more than a decade.

One thing this is supposed to help a lot with is parking.

Hmm.

Tesla’s Slow FSD Rollout

On Tesla’s quarterly financials call this week, Tesla executives were asked about the slow Tesla robotaxi rollout, including just having a small number of cars in each city. Elon Musk responded as follows:

“With Robotaxi, our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we do need to be cautious about causing any accidents or causing any harm to anyone. Although there are, I think, 30,000 to 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the U.S. alone, most of those do not generate any press or maybe, you never really read about almost any of those. If we injure even one person, it’ll be worldwide headline news, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities.

“We don’t want to injure anyone. We’re going as fast as humanly possible in scaling Robotaxi, but while trying to ensure that we do not harm anyone at all, and ideally do not even run over a pet. That’s really the constraint is we want to grow as fast as possible with Robotaxi without harm to anyone.”

And Ashok Elluswamy added:

“The reason we have been expanding across different cities instead of just doubling down on a single city, is that we want to make sure that our stack is a very general one. It is a general one. We just want to both prove to ourselves and to other folks that it is working across a lot of different cities without too much effort per city. That’s what we see internally.”

They were also asked about when the Tesla Semi would get FSD, and the answer from Elon Musk was: “around the end of this year or early next year.” It is seen as a lower priority compared to the Cybercab and “will definitely be working next year and in time for the scale-up to high production of the Tesla Semi.”