Musk’s ailing EV company to expand robotaxis to all Tesla car owners 

Elon Musk, whose car company has lost $385 billion this year, told Tesla car owners they will be allowed to add their vehicles to the company’s robotaxi network sometime next year.

“I’d say confidently next year,” Musk, the CEO of Tesla, said on the call. “I’m not sure when next year, but confidently next year.”

The world’s richest person, despite Tesla’s staggering 2025 losses, made his announcement during a shareholders meeting, in which he made a stark prediction of a “few rough quarters ahead”. Musk’s prediction did not sit well with Tesla investors, as reported by Livemint. Musk said the plan could potentially allow hundreds of thousands of customers to make money by remotely renting out their cars as self-driving cabs.

Marking a major expansion

The Tesla owner’s plan could mark a significant expansion of the company’s robotaxi network, which Musk officially launched last month in Austin with a few self-driving cars that Tesla directly owns and operates, as recently reported by viraltrendingcontent.

Tesla’s move is a bid to level up and compete with industry leader Waymo, whose fleet of self-driving robotaxis ferries paying customers in several cities across the United States.

Musk admitted that his Tesla team has not yet “thought hard” about the details of adding cars that it doesn’t directly own to the robotaxi network. He said that their priority right now is safety in Austin, Texas.

Making sure they’re fully under control

“We need to make sure it works when the vehicles are fully under our control,” Musk stated.

Tesla reported that in Q2 2025, revenue fell 12 per cent year-over-year to $22.5 billion, the EV company’s worst performance in at least a decade. The company attributed the decline to an ongoing slump in vehicle deliveries and falling prices, trends exacerbated by Musk’s involvement in the Trump Administration and declining revenue from environmental credits.

The plan to allow private Tesla users to rent their vehicles within the company’s robotaxi network also raises the prospect of individuals managing their own fleets.

Besides the technological aspect of such a plan, it’s unclear how regulatory and liability issues might come into play. As of now, Tesla has yet to fully remove safety drivers from the vehicles it owns and operates on its fledgling robotaxi service.

For its initial Austin rollout, Tesla has had someone sitting in the passenger seat at all times. Tesla has gradually expanded its service radius in Austin (a map shared by Tesla online last week depicts the latest robotaxi service area in a distinctly phallic shape), and Musk said the company plans to expand it further in a couple of weeks. 

Tesla seeks approval for robotaxi expansion

While Tesla’s robotaxi service is currently only available by invitation, Musk outlined ambitious expansion plans for the robotaxi service during Wednesday’s earnings call, stating that Tesla is seeking regulatory approval to launch in the Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. 

“As soon as we get the approvals and we prove our safety, then we’ll be launching autonomous ride hailing in most of the country, and I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” he said. 

Up until now, Tesla’s robotaxis have not been involved in any major safety incidents, covering approximately 7,000 autonomous miles to date.