Expansion Hinges on Safety Validation
Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call that the real constraint on Robotaxi expansion is rigorous safety validation. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said the work required to launch a new city is decreasing, and Tesla wants to keep compressing that time, eventually moving from city-by-city rollouts to covering an entire state.
The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals, so it cannot keep a safety monitor ready to take over as other Robotaxis can.
Nevada has approved Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 Robotaxis over the next 12 months.
FSD V15 in the Robotaxi Fleet
Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said the Robotaxi fleet is already running an early version of FSD V15. Seven planned major improvements are still in parallel development, and the fleet version has incorporated about 40% of the expected improvements.
Elluswamy said on X that V15 focuses on earlier hazard prediction, faster reaction times, and overall better safety and collision avoidance.
FSD V15 expands neural network parameters roughly 10-fold over the previous version. FSD V14, by comparison, extended the context window from 8 seconds to 24 seconds and raised total parameters 4.5 to 10 times over V13.
Preceding Versions and Architecture Shift
When FSD V12 was released in early 2024, Tesla compressed roughly 300,000 lines of autonomous-driving code to about 3,000 lines, replacing a modular perception-prediction-planning-control architecture with a single end-to-end neural network.