• The Tesla CEO said public rides are “tentatively” planned to begin on June 22, an early birthday present for an entrepreneur that has chased the dream of full self-driving for nearly a decade. Tesla may not have the lead over Waymo in the autonomous ride-hailing market right now, but it could quickly eclipse it thanks to a unique, high-risk approach.

The viral video of a Tesla driverless car cruising the streets of Austin, Texas, lasted fewer than ten seconds but even that was enough to make grown men emotional.

Farzad Mesbahi jumped into his Cybertruck and sped downtown, hunting for a glimpse of a driverless Model Y Juniper. Clips of the vehicle—turning west onto James Street from South Congress Avenue—began circulating online just a day after Austin officially listed Elon Musk’s company as a technology tester.

While Mesbahi, himself a former Tesla employee, gave up after a half hour in the heat, he agreed with many bulls that the day would prove historic.

“This has been part of the [investment] thesis for a really, really long time,” he later told a podcast, explaining why he livestreamed his search for the elusive black crossover with the word Robotaxi emblazoned on the door. 

The widely-shared, nine-second clip already has over 15 million views on Musk’s own X platform.

When asked by a fan “drooling over that one tiny clip” when public rides would start, the Tesla CEO also finally provided the first clear launch date.

“Tentatively June 22,” he wrote. “We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift.” 

But if it does end up being postponed, then likely not by much. The first Tesla that drives itself from the factory to a customer’s house, Musk stated, would be June 28—coinciding with the entrepreneur’s 54th birthday (how far a drive that would be, he notably left out, since Teslas cannot recharge themselves).

Wedbush tech analyst praised Musk for shrewdly timing his “apology tour with Trump” so as not to grab headlines away from the Austin pilot launch or otherwise risk the rollout. 

“We believe Tesla could reach a $2 trillion market cap by the end of 2026 in a bull case scenario,” wrote Ives on Wednesday. That would mean the stock price doubles in the next 18 months.

Waymo may have the lead, but Tesla can out-scale its competitors

For years Tesla has claimed it was on the cusp of solving unsupervised full self-driving, or FSD. When the company first launched FSD in late 2016 using a staged video it has since taken down, Tesla claimed the technology was already there—all it needed was to validate the software.

Six years ago, Musk already felt comfortable enough to predict he would have one million robotaxis on the road by 2020. 

Since then Tesla has undergone two full hardware upgrades to its AI inference computer, now in its fourth generation. Its FSD software is on its thirteenth iteration, not counting the countless minor releases in between. In the meantime, it scrapped its previous approach of painstakingly coding commands in C++ language to adopt an AI-only approach and trained on its own Nvidia cluster, dubbed Cortex.

It’s important to note that Tesla is certainly not the first to launch a robotaxi pilot—Waymo has already graduated past testing to deploy its fleet commercially in several selected cities.

The significance then isn’t so much that Tesla may have potentially solved autonomous driving at long last—although that would be a major accomplishment in its own right—it’s Tesla’s ability to scale its fleet almost instantaneously that makes the launch so important. 

A decade in the making. Extremely proud of Tesla. This will save many lives, a lot of money, and a ton of time. https://t.co/BPFIlF3o8q

— Rob Maurer (@TeslaPodcast) June 10, 2025

Unlike competitors, Tesla doesn’t rely on multiple, expensive LiDARs and a host of radars that adorn each Waymo or Zoox robotaxi to precisely scan their environments in real time using laser beams and sound waves, in addition to other sensors.

Instead it relies solely on artificial intelligence to make sense of the two-dimensional images provided by its comparatively affordable cameras as eyes. Critics have long argued this is a high-risk gamble, however, since there’s no guaranteeing regulators would greenlight robotaxis that lack a sensor suite as backup should the cameras fail. 

“That car you can buy right now for like thirty-eight grand,” Mesbahi said about the Austin robotaxi vehicle captured in the video, “and that car is doing self-driving.”

Musk’s ‘ChatGPT moment’ may soon be here

In fact, it’s not just the newer, refreshed Model Y that should be capable of FSD. Once Musk feel it’s safe enough, Tesla could push out its latest version of the software overnight to the hundreds of thousands of cars already on U.S. roads, so long as they are equipped with its fourth-gen AI inference computer commonly known as HW4. 

That’s because of a prescient decision made many years ago by the CEO to buck the usual industry practice of only equipping hardware a customer orders on purchase. 

Instead he had Tesla install these computers on every single vehicle that rolls off the factory line—whether a customer wanted it or not. While this cost Tesla extra, it would ensure older vehicles would be updateable and upgradeable for the day when unsupervised full self-driving finally rolled out. Musk has called this Tesla’s “ChatGPT moment.”

Just to remove any final doubt he might be hiding anything, Musk explicitly stated the Model Y robotaxi pictured in the clip was standard issue and did not feature any concealed hardware.

“These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory,” Musk said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Jesse Grant—The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images

• Beijing warned the practice of selling new cars with zero miles at a sharp discount in the used car market is just the latest example of “involution”, when domestic companies drag themselves down collectively in a race to the bottom.

China’s ruling Communist Party has warned domestic carmakers to stop using sales-boosting tricks—or risk triggering a vicious cycle that could drag down the entire industry.

On Tuesday, the CCP organ People’s Daily took on the practice of selling new cars as used on the cheap through so-called “zero mileage” discounting. 

“This disguised form of price cutting disrupts normal market order and is a striking example of the auto industry’s ‘involution’,” the daily argued on Tuesday, according to a translation provided by Reuters. 

Involution, or neijuan, is a buzzword that describes a pointless, resource-expending endeavor like spinning on a hamster wheel. But more recently it has come to refer to Beijing’s unhappiness its domestic champions weakening themselves by competing in a race to the bottom. 

“Once market competition rules are properly enforced, ‘zero-mileage used cars’ wont be able to run far — or for long,” it continued. 

Automakers risk conditioning consumers into expecting price cuts

Stuffing the sales channel full with nearly new cars at discounted prices is nothing unique to China. The industry has long maintained a practice called pre-registrations where dealers would offer discounted vehicles with extremely low or even symbolic mileage to offload slower moving stock and reach sales targets. 

But China appears to have taken the practice to an extreme, ridding itself of this fig leaf of symbolic mileage amid a raging price war that is already halfway through its third year. 

The primary culprit right now is BYD, the country’s largest carmaker, which has been slashing prices at a brutal rate, forcing other competitors to either follow suit or lose market share. Late last month it reduced prices across a number of the the starting price of its cheapest model, the Seagull EV hatchback, to the equivalent of $7,800 from nearly $10,000 previously. BYD could not be reached by Fortune for comment.

Typically once the industry conditions consumers to expect price cuts, it can create a vicious circle as buyers wait on the sidelines for better deals. Over time it becomes increasingly hard to wean them off discounts. 

China can build twice as many cars as it can sell domestically

The price war results from years of overinvestment in the car industry, where privately owned companies such as BYD and Geely compete alongside industry newcomers like consumer electronics giant Xiaomi as well as a host of state-owned rivals. 

The latter often see political interests promoted over market forces at the cost of profits. These include the central government’s First Automobile Works (FAW) and Dongfeng, as well as peers like Shanghai’s SAIC and Guangdong’s GAC that are controlled by their municipal or provincial party leaders.

With all these players jockeying for enough of a share to reach critical scale, China now has the estimated installed capacity across to build nearly 50 million cars a year, or twice as many as the industry can sell domestically. All these superfluous fixed costs put enormous pressure on carmakers to boost sales volumes at almost any price just to eke out an existence.

Last July, consultancy Alix Partners predicted a shake-out in the Chinese car industry currently featuring 137 electric vehicle brands. Only one out of every seven will be profitable by the end of the decade, it concluded. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© CFOTO—Future Publishing via Getty Images

• Optimus unites all the attributes Elon Musk loves in a killer product—one identical set of hardware that can be affordably produced at scale, yet capable of meeting various needs through intelligent software features. Now, Tesla’s vaunted robot project, tipped to add $25 trillion in value to the company, lost the director who has run the program since its inception three years ago.

The brains behind CEO Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar dream of a robot future are gone, and the repercussions are only starting to be felt as staff members say their goodbyes. 

On Friday, Milan Kovac announced he would leave Tesla after more than nine years to spend more time with his family abroad. A naturalized European immigrant, he originally came to the U.S. on the same H-1B visa that Musk argues is vital to America’s competitiveness.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of his departure for Tesla since Musk himself has predicted Kovac’s humanoid robot Optimus ought to add $25 trillion to its market cap—more than all 10 of the world’s most valuable companies combined. Investors have been eager for every update Musk posts on social media showing its progress, such as last month’s video of the droid nimbly dancing on two metallic feet. 

🕺 pic.twitter.com/NzqAmN3F5z

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2025

“Milan, thank you for your outstanding contribution to Tesla over the past decade. It was an honor working with you,” the entrepreneur acknowledged on Friday.

Optimus incorporates all the traits Musk wants

In charge of the Optimus robot program since the start of 2022 and promoted in September to vice president, Kovac was not one of the more publicly visible Tesla executives. Nor is it all that unusual for key personnel to succumb to the brutal grind that comes with working for such a demanding CEO as Musk. 

Given his role as head of the program since its inception, Kovac‘s leaving represents a loss perhaps best akin to the departure of Tesla’s former director of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, three years ago.

“This one hits different. You’re in the Tesla hall of fame, brother,” wrote Ryan Donnelly, Tesla’s director of North America recruiting. “Thanks for challenging and inspiring us, and for being the glue that held things together.”

Named after the Autobot leader from Hasbro’s popular Transformer franchise, Optimus isn’t just a potential revenue stream: It is the future of Tesla.

From the beginning, Musk predicted the robot would become more important to the company than its EV business. 

It unites all the attributes of a killer product that Musk loves—one standardized piece of hardware that can be affordably produced at scale, but still meets various market needs, thanks to ever-improving software updates.

“This is going to be bigger than the car,” he said in April 2022, a claim that sounded even more ambitious back then when there seemed to be no limit to Tesla’s EV sales. 

Designing for a utopian society built on sustainable abundance

Kovac may not have had the public profile of Karpathy, or chief vehicle engineer Lars Moravy, but his role was core to Tesla’s equity story.

Musk predicted the droids Kovac was creating would revolutionize human behavior, and in his vision, everyone across the globe would own at least one robot, eliminating any ceiling on economic growth.

He called this an era of “sustainable abundance,” the world’s first utopian society where there is no more scarcity. 

2023 has been awesome for Optimus.

We’ve moved from an exploratory prototype (Bumblebee/cee) to a more stable, Tesla-designed platform (Optimus Gen-1).

We’ve improved our locomotion stack, frequently walking off-gantry without falls and with a faster, increasingly more… pic.twitter.com/yCnD0SThBd

— Milan Kovac (@_milankovac_) December 31, 2023

But Musk recently opened up about the challenges Tesla faces working with an entirely new supply chain and technology, recounting how they “tried desperately” to outfit Optimus with existing, off-the-shelf actuators and sensors before deciding to design them all from scratch.

“We are designing the train and the station in real time, while also building the tracks,” he said during the Q4 earnings call in January.

Optimus has also suffered its fair share of negative publicity, affecting robotics companies grappling with high expectations.

‘Tesla will win, I guarantee you that’

Musk earned criticism in January 2024 for posting a video of Optimus folding laundry that initially failed to mention the robot was not acting of its own accord.

This then repeated itself at October’s Cybercab reveal event, dubbed “We, Robot,” where untethered versions of the two-legged droid interacted with guests, leading them to believe they were intelligent rather than remotely operated by humans.

In April, the CEO revealed that his robot ambitions had also fallen victim to shortages in rare earth magnets caused by leading refiner China. 

Yet these setbacks haven’t tempered Musk’s enthusiasm. He has predicted Tesla would go from building at least 5,000 this year—equivalent in size to a Roman legion as he put it—before increasing that 200-fold as early as 2029. 

“We expect to scale up Optimus faster than any product, I think, in history, to get to millions of units per year as soon as possible,” he said during the Q1 earnings call. 

In his goodbye on Friday, Kovac struck a humble tone.

The accomplishments achieved were his team’s rather than his own, he argued. As such, the Optimus project was not in any way in danger.

“My departure now will not change a thing,” he said, going on to end with the prediction that “Tesla will win, I guarantee you that.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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