AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla’s next-generation self-driving software is already on public roads, and it is arriving sooner than many expected. On the company’s July 22 second-quarter earnings call, executives confirmed that the retrofitted Model Y vehicles running paid, driverless rides on the Robotaxi network are already operating early builds of Full Self-Driving v15.
The disclosure reframes how quickly Tesla is moving from its current v14 stack to the architecture it says will unlock nationwide autonomy. It also landed alongside a striking safety claim from the team leading the effort.
An Impeccable Safety Record
Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy told investors the Robotaxi program has been operating extremely well, especially on safety. He said the fleet has driven more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised Robotaxi operation across six cities in two states with an impeccable safety record and zero notable incidents caused by the vehicles themselves.
That milestone builds on a rapid expansion that has seen driverless rides reach seven major metropolitan areas, including new commercial launches in Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Elluswamy said Tesla has been growing unsupervised miles at double-digit rates week over week, a pace he expects to accelerate as the software matures.
Why v15 Matters
Elluswamy said Tesla targeted seven major improvement tracks for v15 over v14, all being developed in parallel. Even the early builds already in the field carry roughly 40 percent of those planned gains, and internal benchmarks are hitting their objectives. According to Tesla, the finished version will be dramatically safer and more capable, running with about 10 times more parameters than current builds.
Crucially, the Model Y robotaxis rely on standard Hardware 4 hardware, the same suite in consumer vehicles, which offers reassurance to owners that their cars are on the path to the same software. Tesla has said v15 will roll out publicly later this year or early next, and the company recently began the wide release of FSD v14 Lite for older hardware to keep legacy vehicles improving in parallel.
Paving the Way for Scale
Tesla had previously said it would wait for v15 before ramping Robotaxi into many new cities at once. With early v15 now proving itself in live service, the company signaled that broader commercial availability, and eventually statewide rollouts rather than city-by-city launches, could follow quickly.
The details, drawn from Tesla’s official Q2 earnings materials and call, point to a company that is tightening the loop between its consumer fleet and its driverless service. Every mile the Robotaxi fleet logs feeds the same neural networks that will ship to millions of privately owned Teslas, and that shared data advantage is exactly what Tesla believes will let it scale autonomy faster than any rival in the months ahead.
