ROBOTAXIS
LYFT EYES 2026 DALLAS ROBOTAXI LAUNCH WITH MOBILEYE PARTNERSHIP
Dallas could see self-driving robotaxis on its streets as early as 2026, as Lyft announces plans to deploy vehicles in partnership with Mobileye. The rideshare giant’s initiative, revealed by Bloomberg, involves a collaboration with Tokyo-based auto financing firm Marubeni, which will own the robotaxi fleet.
“Marubeni manages over 900,000 vehicles through its subsidiaries and has seen year-over-year growth in the auto business,” Lyft CEO David Risher stated on X
(formerly Twitter), highlighting the strategic partnership. The robotaxis will leverage Mobileye’s autonomous driving technology. Lyft’s ambition extends beyond Dallas, with plans to “have thousands of the self-driving cars head to more cities in the future,” according to a company spokes- person quoted by Bloomberg. The project is currently in “advanced planning stages to finalise” the rollout. This move places Lyft alongside other major players in the AV
space. Uber, for instance, has been operating self-driving cars in Phoenix for over a year and is set to expand to Austin and Atlanta. Google’s Waymo has also broad- ened its operations in Los Angeles. Globally, other companies are also pushing forward with robotaxi initiatives. Rimac’s Verne programme is scheduled to launch in Zagreb in 2026, with plans for expansion to Manchester and other international cities. In Japan, startup Tier IV is developing its own mini-van-inspired robocabs.
TESLA AIMS FOR JUNE LAUNCH OF SELF-DRIVING TAXI SERVICE IN AUSTIN
Elon Musk has announced that Tesla plans to launch a commercial, self-driving taxi service in Austin, Texas, this June. Speaking on an earnings call discussing Tesla’s fourth-quarter 2024 financial results, Musk reiterated his ambitions for the company’s autonomous driving technology, a topic on which he has made numerous predictions, many of which have yet to materialise. “We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsuper- vised, no one in the car, full self-driving in Austin in June,” Musk stated. He claimed that Tesla vehicles are already operating autonomously and unsupervised at their Fremont factory,
with
similar operations soon to begin at their Texas facility. “These Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin. This is not some far-off
PHTM MARCH 2025
mythical situation. It’s literally five, six months away.”
This timeline aligns with a prediction Musk made on an earnings call last year. Perhaps more significantly, he indicated that the unsupervised version of Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) software, which still requires regulatory approval, will initially be offered as a “paid service.” This differs from Tesla’s long- promoted vision of unsupervised FSD being available to individual customers for their own vehicles. Musk clarified: “It will be our fleet testing it.” While the precise details remain unclear, this suggests a com- mercial robotaxi service similar to that already operated by Waymo in Austin and other cities. However, Musk added: “Our sort of solution is a generalised AI solution… it does not require high precision maps of
locality,” distinguishing it from Waymo’s approach. Musk projected that unsupervised FSD would expand to other American cities “as shortly as possible” after the Austin launch, likely in the form of similar self- driving taxi services. “I expect us to be operating unsupervised activity with our internal fleet in several cities by the end of the year,” he said. Looking further ahead, Musk suggested that private Tesla owners would gain access to unsupervised FSD for their personal vehicles in 2026, with the ability to “add or subtract their car from the [Tesla robotaxi] fleet… kind of like Airbnb.” Whether these ambitious plans come to fruition remains to be seen, particularly given Tesla’s history of missed deadlines. The level of autonomy that unsuper- vised FSD will ultimately deliver is also a key question.
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