Tesla is trying to deceive investors into thinking it has San Francisco Robotaxi

Tesla claimed in today’s Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter that it started a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area “with Robotaxi technology,” but this is impossible given that the company has no license to operate an autonomous taxi in California.

After years of promises, Tesla finally started offering its “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas this June. The Robotaxi service is not really a robotaxi, by what we would expect the colloquial definition to be, as each car currently has a “safety monitor” in it at all times, with access to a kill switch should things go south.

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride so far, but this is one step towards the autonomy promises Tesla has been making for around a decade now.

Tesla also recently did its first autonomous local car delivery, though we’ve only seen one example of that, making it seem to be more of a publicity stunt than an actual sustainable piece of the business.

Along with the introduction of Robotaxis in Austin, Musk made big claims about what’s to come. In July, just a month after the Austin rollout, Musk said that Tesla would cover half of the US population by the end of the year. We are now three months later and two months from the end of this year, and Tesla has made zero progress on that goal – it covers approximately the same area as it previously did, in only one relatively small city.

Or, well, is it two cities? If you ask Tesla, it has also rolled out a Robotaxi-like product in San Francisco, the metro area where the company was founded, and where other autonomous ride-hailing companies have been operating for years now.

In Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter, released today, the company included a line stating that it “launched ride-hailing service in the Bay Area using Robotaxi technology” in Q3. Later, on the conference call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said “in the Bay Area, where we still have someone in the driver’s seat due to regulations, we crossed more than a million miles” during a portion of the call talking about Tesla’s Robotaxi program.

However, note that while both of these statements are very clearly Robotaxi-adjacent, they ever-so-slightly skirt around the direct statement that Tesla has rolled out Robotaxis in San Francisco… because, well, it hasn’t.

Despite the company’s statements today, its ride-hailing service is just that – ride-hailing, similar to Uber or Lyft, with nothing special about it other than the fact that the cars involved are Teslas and that those cars have access to Tesla’s level 2 driver-assist system.

There is functionally no difference between hailing a ride on this service versus hailing a ride from a Tesla driver who drives for Uber or Lyft, except that you use a different app to do so. Well, and that the app is limited only to an exclusive group of Tesla Early Access customers, rather than open to the general public like other ride-hailing apps are.

One of the reasons for this, and the reason we know that Tesla isn’t operating real robotaxis in California, is because it can’t. Tesla did obtain a ride-hailing permit earlier this year, but has not obtained a permit to operate an actual driverless taxi service. Those permits do exist in California, and have been obtained by other companies – but they come along with reporting requirements, which Tesla has heretofore been hesitant to comply with.

But that hasn’t stopped Tesla from claiming, as the very first line item in the “highlights” of its “operations” for the quarter, that it made some sort of breakthrough with Robotaxi by launching it in the Bay Area.

This seems like a relatively minor introduction, especially given that it has been alluded to in previous quarterly conference calls. But, despite the lack of forward movement on Tesla’s autonomy project (and, in fact, some regression), Tesla wanted to suggest to investors that something big had happened this quarter. But it hasn’t.

Tesla went on to talk about the future of Robotaxi on the call, stating that it would come to 8-10 metro areas by the end of the year. This is a far shout from the at least 47 metro areas that were promised just three months ago, and yet, still seems like it may not be achieved with only two months left in the year.

Musk did state on the call that the public can see where Tesla has applied for permits, naming Arizona, Nevada and Florida specifically. Notably, California was not on that list. He also stated that Tesla would likely drop the “safety monitor” from its Austin Robotaxis by the end of this year, and that future metro areas would start off with safety monitors and then drop them after a few months.

We’ll have to wait and see whether any of those things happen. But the fact that Tesla is using deceptive language in front of its investors, especially as its also begging them to give Musk $1 trillion dollars (so he can control a robot army), doesn’t make us feel like there’s a lot of honesty going around here. If the company can deceive shareholders in one way as it has today (and as it has done before), it’s likely to lie to shareholders in other ways too.

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