Tesla has applied to the California Public Utilities Commission for a permit to operate a ride service in California. There are six different permits involved to do this. Tesla currently has one, but has never actually used it.
Earlier, Tesla declared they would start an autonomous robotaxi service in Austin in June, with no one in the car, unsupervised by a human, carrying members of the public as passengers. Texas has far less regulation than California, so this could be possible if they can indeed make the technology work. However, Tesla has also stated that it plans to offer service “this year” in California, and possibly the rest of the country. Critics have pointed out that Tesla has not even begun the permit process that would be necessary, and apparently Tesla has taken notice and begun this process, though very likely too late to operate this year.
There are six state permits, along with any federal requirements such as NHTSA’s Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and other such laws.
- DMV Autonomous Vehicle testing permit (with safety driver) – Tesla has this permit, but always reports they have done zero miles of testing.
- DMV testing permit with no safety driver. Tesla does not have this.
- DMV operation permit with no safety driver. Tesla does not have this. This is the key permit revoked from Cruise by the DMV that led to their downfall.
- CPUC ride service permit, which allows human-driven ride service. This is what Tesla has applied for. This lets you be like Uber.
- CPUC autonomous vehicle fareless ride service permit. Tesla does not have this and it requires permits 1-4. No fees can be charged for rides.
- CPUC autonomous vehicle ride service permit, charging fares.
There’s a long chain of permits here with some bureaucracy to manage. In addition, applying for these latter permits requires certification that the vehicle has met certain safety levels, and these are levels that Tesla is still very far–probably many years–from reaching. Their current FSD version 13 system is reported by drivers to need a critical intervention around every 400 miles. (Waymo, by contrast just had insurance auditors report it was going 2.3 million miles between at-fault liability incidents. That’s not the same as critical interventions but Tesla declines to release comparable data.) Cruise also released data stating a good record, though not as good as Waymo’s.
Cruise, however, had a seroius incident in 2023 which caused the DMV to revoke its permits. The CPUC followed up revoking theirs. Two reasons were cited, namely poor safety performance, and hiding imortant information from regulators. While most believe it was the latter that was the primary reason, the DMV has never responded to questions about that. Tesla has some distance to go to get this permit and the other permits.
It’s also odd that while they have had permit #1 above for some time, they have not used it. Each year, they fill out the required reports and state they did zero miles of testing. They do lots of testing, but claim that this is just their car being used in supervised ADAS mode. That’s technically true, but when the laws were written, a clear distinction was made between ADAS cars, and cars in development to be self driving. Tesla, in the very name of their system, declares it to be a prototype self-driving system.
Strangely, Anthony Levandowski, when he was running Uber’s ATG self-driving team, attempted the same approach (even though he and I helped draft the laws about this.) He tried to declare Uber’s cars with a safety driver were just ADAS. The DMV rebuked him, and told Uber they would pull the licence plates from Uber’s test cars if they didn’t change this. Uber complied. The DMV has never made the same threat towards Tesla, for reasons unknown–perhaps because Uber is an automaker and the ADAS carve-out was put in at the request of traditional automakers.
There are other issues in the permits for Tesla. For example, the important operation permit requires a declaration that the vehicles in question are “incapable of operating in autonomous mode” outside their official service area (ODD.) Since Tesla’s dream of a vehicle that can drive everywhere is not currently doable, they won’t be doing this except with dedicated cars with this limit. But that’s hardly the only challenge in getting and keeping this permit.
However, the only real consequence of this bit of news is that Tesla is no longer completely ignoring its permit requirements.
