Tesla is courting Texas cities to test its robotaxi service

AUSTIN – Tech Crunch reports that Tesla is evaluating multiple Texas cities where it wants to test a long-promised robotaxi service, including Austin, according to emails obtained by Bloomberg News. An employee has apparently been in touch with Austin officials since May, and recently held an event in December to “train first responders on how to best work with Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology,” which is still in development. The employee told the city that “Austin is obviously on our roadmap, but has not yet been decided where we will deploy first as we have many options available.” (Tesla often pits multiple cities and states against each other when it’s making decisions on where to do business; it caused a bidding war over the location of its original Gigafactory that reportedly inspired Jeff Bezos to do something similar when locating Amazon’s second headquarters.) Tesla is not testing any vehicles on public streets, according to the report. That could be because, despite unveiling a so-called “Cybercab” prototype in October, the company has yet to deliver on CEO Elon Musk’s years of promises of making a fully self-driving Tesla, let alone a robotaxi service.