Tesla has autonomous ride-hailing service in pipeline: what to know

Tesla and CEO Elon Musk this week shared slightly more of their vision for the autonomous ride-hailing service that the electric vehicle (EV) maker seeks to build.

That additional information came Tuesday as the company published its first-quarter earnings that included updates on its future models, robotaxi, artificial intelligence efforts and more.

Tesla said it plans to "seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App." 

The "preview" images that the company released Tuesday suggested the ride-hailing service’s app will resemble those of existing ride-share companies. It could potentially have a "summon" button, too.

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The "ride-hailing functionality" it is developing "will be available in the future," according to Tesla’s first-quarter shareholder presentation.

"We have been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. We believe a scalable and profitable autonomy business can be realized through a vision-only architecture with end-to-end neural networks, trained on billions of miles of real-word data," the company also said.

Tesla has previously identified creating an autonomous fleet as a goal of the company.

Musk on Tuesday said the fleet would be Tesla-run and likened it to an Airbnb-Uber mashup.

"Think of it like some combination of Airbnb and Uber, meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet," he said. "There will be some number of cars, and then there will be a bunch of cars where they’re owned by the end user."

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The users would have the ability to "add or subtract their car to the fleet whenever they want" and "decide if they want to only let the car be used by friends and family, or only by 5-star users, or by anyone at any time" before calling it back to them for personal use, Musk explained.

Building an autonomous ride-hailing service has long been a target of Tesla, with the EV maker’s CEO discussing it at multiple points, including in 2019 and 2022. It will require fully-autonomous Teslas.

Tesla launched the latest version of its Full Self Driving software, which requires driver supervision, earlier this year. And, towards the end of the summer, Tesla has an event to introduce its purpose-built "Cybercab" robotaxi slated to take place. 

More information about another project of Tesla — lower-cost EV models — will come at the same time as the Cybercab reveal, Musk said Tuesday. 

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The cheaper vehicles and other planned new models will "utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and will be able to be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up," according to Tesla.

In 2023, its total vehicle production and deliveries reached about 1.85 million and 1.8 million, respectively.