AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla said Friday it has cleared the final California regulatory hurdle to carry paying passengers in a fully driverless Robotaxi service, opening rides to the public across parts of the San Francisco Bay Area and planting the company's autonomy business in the most scrutinized automated-driving market in the country.
The approval lets Tesla operate without a safety driver in a defined service area that includes stretches of San Francisco, San Jose and the Peninsula, with the company able to widen the zone as it logs miles. Riders join through the same Tesla app used in Austin, hail a car and watch it arrive empty before stepping in.
From Austin Outward
California is the latest step in a steady geographic march. Tesla opened its first public Robotaxi rides in Austin earlier this year and recently expanded the Houston service area to about 254 square miles. Adding the Bay Area matters not only for the size of the market but for its symbolism: it is the home turf of several rival robotaxi operators and the state where autonomous-vehicle rules are most demanding.
Company officials framed the clearance as validation of a camera-and-neural-network approach that forgoes the spinning lidar sensors competitors rely on. That approach keeps the hardware cost of each vehicle low, which Tesla argues is the only way to scale a driverless fleet into the hundreds of thousands of cars without pricing itself out of the market.
