Tesla has been rushing to get everything in order for its ambitious launch: beginning to test the robotaxis with safety drivers in Austin, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, just a few weeks ago—and, more recently—hosting initial meetings and overviews with Texas agencies and Austin city departments to brief them on some of the details.
But key groups—including Austin’s transportation department, Austin’s emergency first responders, and federal regulators—are still missing important information about the self-driving machines set to imminently hit the roads of the Texas capital. Tesla hasn’t hosted trainings with Austin emergency responders. It hasn’t specified what level of autonomy Tesla cars will be using at launch (the industry’s 5-point scale entails everything from cars that require constant human supervision to vehicles with no steering wheels). And, as of last week, Tesla still hadn’t shared first responder plans or guides that the Austin Fire Department and Austin transportation department ask self-driving car companies for and rely on when responding to safety episodes, the departments told Fortune.
“We have not yet received First Responder guides from Tesla,” a spokesman for the Austin transportation department told Fortune in an email Wednesday. The fire department “has not received a guide either,” a department spokeswoman said. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Tesla has assured city employees that those guidebooks are coming, however. And its robotaxi engineering teams have been in regular communication with the City since last year, according to emails obtained by Fortune via Freedom of Information Requests.
On Monday, Tesla conducted live testing with several members of Austin’s autonomous vehicle working group, driving one of its robotaxi cars alongside emergency vehicles on a closed neighborhood street. At the event, Tesla laid out some of their preliminary plans for the launch, according to Andre Jordan, division chief of special operations and homeland security for the Austin Fire Department, who was present.
Hands-on training sessions and detailed guidebooks for first responders are coming, Jordan says he’s been assured by Tesla. “That is something that they’ve been working on and they want to deliver, as well as the first responder training,” Jordan tells Fortune. “I believe them,” he added, saying that the company has been transparent with them and willing to collaborate. “I don’t know if they’ve met all their timelines, but they have done what they said they would do.”
Jordan noted that Tesla has made four modifications to its launch plans—adding specific guardrails or risk mitigations to the service—that have made the Fire Department feel more comfortable, though he repeatedly declined to specify what they were, saying that they were “preliminary” and that it was Tesla’s “business information.”
“We had initially thought that that launch date was especially optimistic, but I don’t know if that’s the case anymore,” Jordan says. “So I don’t know. I’m kind of guessing along with everybody else, but the details that they have shared were reassuring.”
In choosing Austin for its robotaxi debut, Tesla has selected a location with looser regulatory requirements than California cities like San Francisco.
While Tesla has assured city employees that it plans to share more information in advance of launch, the Transportation and Public Works spokesman pointed out that the city cannot require Tesla to provide it in advance of launch, as it doesn’t have enforcement authority under Texas law.
But with just weeks to go until the launch, it’s not clear what the technical classification of the cars will be. Under industry-wide autonomy classifications, only cars with “Level 4” and “Level 5” technology are capable of operating without a human behind the wheel. (Waymo’s customized Jaguars, for example, are Level 4)
When asked by Fortune whether the system Tesla is already testing is Level 2, Level 3, or Level 4 autonomy, the transportation department spokesman said the city wasn’t sure. While Tesla had communicated with the department that it had begun testing, “we do not know the details of the testing,” he said.
Curiously, some of the recent information Tesla has shared with regulators in California—where the company is also conducting initial testing of a robotaxi service with safety drivers—suggests its technology may still require a human safety driver.
In an email to the California Public Utilities Commission on April 16, Tesla shared a notice it had sent out to employees that described the full self-driving (FSD) system it is using in California robotaxi tests as a “Level 2” system. “The FSD system in use is an SAE Level 2 system that enforces driver attention, with system limits and can be disengaged via the traditional steering/braking/button methods,” reads the Tesla email, which was sent out to Bay Area employees just last month.
“They’re going to be as conservative as possible in the way they speak about this,” says Richard Bishop, an autonomous consultant who publishes an annual report on robotaxis.” Tesla’s notice to the California regulator therefore might not be “a good indication of what reality is in terms of capability.”
“We believe the vast majority of valuation upside looking ahead for Tesla is centered around the success of its autonomous vision taking hold with a key June launch in Austin the beginning of this next era of growth for Musk and Tesla,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst who has covered Tesla for more than a decade, wrote Friday in a note to investors.
That said, Tesla has a history of missing deadlines Musk lays out for the company. In 2019, Musk said that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis out on the roads by 2020. In 2022, he said production of robotaxis with no steering wheels would have started in 2024.