Old Video Shows Elon Musk Saying That What Tesla's Launching This Month Wouldn't Count as Full Self-Driving

The launch date for Tesla's long-awaited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas continues to slip, raising embarrassing questions for the company.

For one, the modified Model Y SUVs that will initially make up the EV maker's robotaxi fleet won't technically be driverless, because they'll be teleoperated by human employees if anything goes wrong.

They'll also be geofenced to only the easiest areas to drive in, which as Electrek points out is a fascinating example of how CEO Elon Musk has moved goalposts for the project so far that he's now basically playing a different sport.

Why? Because a clip of Musk speaking at the firm's annual shareholder meeting in 2019 that caught the attention of Reddit users this week shows him lampooning the idea of geofenced self-driving.

"If you need a geofence area, you don't have real self-driving!" Musk exclaimed at the time.

Roughly six years later, the mercurial CEO is singing a dramatically different tune.

"When we will deploy the cars in Austin, we are actually going to deploy it, not to the entire Austin region, but only in the parts we consider to be the safest," Musk told CNBC in May, "so we will geofence it."

The complete reversal is perfectly representative of the entrepreneur's years-long attempt to paint the company's so-called "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance software as an engineering challenge that's mere months away from being solved. (He's infamously promised that self-driving cars would become a reality "next year" every year for over a decade now.)

In reality, Tesla appears to have bitten off far more than it can chew, continuously lagging far behind its CEO's boisterous promises, with its vehicles still careening into oncoming lanes, crashing into emergency vehicles, and even confused by the setting Sun.

A recent public demonstration sponsored by Tesla watchdog the Dawn Project showed a Tesla with its "Full Self-Driving" feature turned on, mowing down a child-sized mannequin next to a school bus.

To put on the appearance that Tesla is right around the corner from catching up with the likes of driverless car-hailing service Waymo, executives are trying their darndest to reassure investors.

One image posted by Tesla’s head of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, shows a suspiciously cropped photo of two robotaxis, conveniently cutting out the portion of the image that would've shown a safety driver in the passenger seat.

We still don't know when Tesla will finally roll out its extremely limited robotaxi service in Austin. Instead of having an inaugural event planned — which is the least one would expect from a company with a market cap north of $1 trillion — Musk most recently hinted that the launch is "tentatively" scheduled for June 22.

A lot is riding on the company's robotaxi service. Amid plummeting sales and disastrous financials, Musk has bet his cards on autonomous vehicles, a gamble that hasn't really worked out for him in the past.

What exactly the company's robotaxi launch will look like remains to be seen. However, at this point, it's safe to assume it will involve plenty of smoke and mirrors.

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