Tesla teases its upcoming Uber-like self-driving ride-hailing app

Tesla has teased its upcoming self-driving ride-hailing app, previously called ‘Tesla Network’, that the automaker is positioning as a Uber competitor.

For years now, Tesla has been talking about releasing a ride-hailing app to compete with Uber and now Waymo.

At times, there have been talks about releasing it without self-driving capability, but it is now clear that it is what the automaker is waiting for.

While Tesla has yet to achieve unsupervised self-driving, which would obviously be needed for an autonomous ride-hailing app, recent progress is encouraging the company to start working on that ride-hailing app.

Today, with the release of its Q1 2024 financial results, Tesla has decided to tease its ride-hailing app with some screenshots:

The screenshot shows Uber-like characteristics, but it also includes features unique to self-driving vehicles, like “summoning” the vehicle and adjusting temperature and music directly from the app.

Tesla briefly mentioned its ride-hailing app in its Q1 earnings results:

We have been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service.

And then added:

We are currently working on ride-hailing functionality that will be available in the future. We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.

This confirms that the ride-hailing will not be in a separate app, but instead, it will be directly included in the existing and already popular Tesla app.

The automaker didn’t talk about the timing for the release of its ride-hailing service, which again will be dependent on Tesla achieving unsupervised self-driving – something it has yet to do, but claims to be closer than ever to with the release of its FSD v12 software.

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