Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday that his company will have a “widespread” network of driverless robotaxis in the U.S. by the end of 2026.
“Tesla’s rolled out robotaxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S.,” he said during an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Tesla robotaxis finally hit the road in Austin in June with human safety supervisors on board, after years of pushing back promises to deliver fully driverless cars. The company later launched a ride-share in San Francisco with cars driven by humans.
The company has not obtained permits to test or run its vehicles on public roads in California without humans at the wheel.
Musk re-posted a Tesla employee on X on Thursday who said robotaxi rides without monitors “are now publicly available in Austin.”
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla VP of AI software, said in the post that the rollout would start with “a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time.”
In 2019, Musk told investors that he was “very confident” the company could roll out the vehicles by 2020.
Tesla is operating in an increasingly competitive driverless vehicle market, dominated by Alphabet-backed Waymo. Amazon-owned Zoox also entered the space in 2025. Waymo ended the year in five U.S. markets and launched service in Miami on Thursday.
It was Musk’s first attendance at the annual gathering of world leaders in years. The tech billionaire previously mocked the forum on social media, calling it “boring af.”
During his conversation with Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, Musk also said Tesla would be selling its Optimus robots to the public by the end of 2027.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years, but the rate at which AI is progressing, I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year, and I’d say no later than next year,” Musk said.
WATCH: The year that the robotaxi went mainstream, with Waymo leading the pack
CNBC’s Lora Kolodny also contributed to this story.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/22/musk-tesla-robotaxis-us-expansion.html
