Tesla now has a deadline for letting owners add their own vehicles to its robotaxi fleet: the second quarter of 2027.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP for Autonomous Driving, gave the target during the company's third-quarter earnings call. The software for Cybercabs (Tesla's purpose-built robotaxi) and for the Model Y is the same, he said, and "pretty soon" Tesla will release that same software as part of its V15 release. He gave no date for V15 itself. The only firm date in his remarks was the second quarter of 2027 for customer-owned cars joining the fleet.
That makes this the first time Tesla has attached a deadline to the idea. Elon Musk has spent years making big promises to owners about unsupervised driving, meaning no human watching the road, and about earning money by lending a car to a robotaxi network. Those promises came without a date a shareholder could hold the company to.
A quarter is still a window, not a launch. Elluswamy's remarks, as quoted, say nothing about how owners would enroll, what approvals Tesla needs, or what a customer car would have to do before it counted as ready. "Pretty soon" for V15 leaves the earlier steps just as open.
The model also differs from the rival most people compare Tesla to. Waymo runs a fleet it controls, so it decides which cars carry passengers. Tesla's plan would put privately owned cars into the same network, a harder job because the company would be relying on vehicles it did not buy, park, or maintain. The shared software Elluswamy described explains why Tesla thinks it can try. It does not show that it will work.
The next checkpoint is V15 itself, since the 2027 target depends on it arriving first.