Tesla says customers can add their own vehicles to the robotaxi fleet next year — will it happen?

For years, Elon Musk has been making big promises to Tesla owners about unsupervised autonomous driving and the ability to add their own vehicles to the company’s robotaxi fleet. During today’s third-quarter earnings call, the company finally gave itself a deadline.

According to Tesla VP for Autonomous Driving Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla owners will be able to add their own vehicles to the company’s robotaxi fleet in the second quarter of 2027. Here’s his exact quote (emphasis ours):

Like I mentioned earlier, the software for Cybercabs and Model Y is the same. And pretty soon we’ll be able to release the same software as part of the V15 release to customers. The only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer Model Y can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous. We suspect somewhere around Q2 next year is when we can turn on some of the first customer vehicles to be part of the robotaxi fleet.

It’s important to mark this deadline because it’s likely that Tesla will sail right past it. When it comes to autonomous driving and robotaxis, Musk has a pretty clear pattern: he sets bold, short-term deadlines that end up slipping by years — or never happening at all. Still, Tesla has made steady, incremental strides in the tech behind its consumer driver-assistance features. But the long-promised goal of “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving remains unfulfilled.

In 2019, Musk stood on stage at the company’s first AI Day and vowed that customer-owned vehicles could be used as part of a “Tesla Network” of robotaxis, earning their owners passive income while driving around autonomously, looking for fares. He likened it to Uber or Airbnb. Musk also said that by 2020, a “million” Tesla robotaxis would be out on the road.

As of yet, neither promise has come true. Tesla has a few hundred Robotaxis in Texas and Florida, some of which still have human safety monitors. It also has several dozen fully driverless Cybercabs in Austin.

Still, FSD growth was a bright spot in Tesla’s earnings this quarter. More people buying new Teslas in North America are choosing to add Full Self-Driving (Supervised), the company reported. Over 75 percent of new buyers picked the feature this quarter — a big jump of almost 20 percentage points compared to last quarter. Still, Tesla’s vehicle sales were down this quarter, as revenue flatlined and profits dipped.

Tesla also revealed a new Robotaxi safety website, in which the company says it has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously. That’s up from 380,000 unsupervised miles driven the company reported in July.

But even if Tesla opens up its robotaxi fleet to customer-owned vehicles, major regulatory hurdles remain. Unsupervised autonomous ride-hailing requires specific local and state regulatory permits. Insurance may be difficult to obtain. And in most places, it’s still illegal for individuals or outside companies to use their own self-driving cars as driverless taxis or passenger rides.

There’s also the tension between different types of Tesla owners. Older Model 3 and Y vehicles without the latest full-self-driving hardware suites (or AI compute infrastructure) are constrained by hardware capability. Dedicated vehicles like the Cybercab are built specifically for driverless passenger service, whereas consumer vehicles require additional software layers to guarantee safety without human intervention.

Tesla might be confident it can clear every technical and legal hurdle by Q2 2027. But history says this could easily become just another deadline that quietly slips by.

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