Tesla will launch an app that the user can ride and share before achieving full autonomy, including the company’s own driver insurance.
The app was named Tesla Network and is intended to be released with human drivers instead of a full self-driving system. Elon Musk thinks that: “I think it will probably make sense to enable car sharing in advance of the kind of robotaxi fleet because the car-sharing can be done before regulators approve full Self-Driving. So it’s probably something that we would enable before a sort of robotaxi fleet is enabled.”
Tesla had also made some partnerships with insurance companies, but now the automaker plans to launch its own insurance program, only offered in California for now.
Zach Kirkhorn, Tesla CFO, plans to expand it to other markets as well: “Tesla Insurance is currently available in California. A couple of things that we’re working on this front: The first is to expand it to other locations, and we are preparing the regulatory processes, preparing our processes to go through the regulatory processes in those locations. We’re also working on the processes to continue to adjust our rates in California, which also have to go through regulatory processes as insurance is quite heavily regulated. And that’s where we’re spending our time focusing on Tesla Insurance right now. There is a significant amount of innovation, as we’ve discussed before in this space, exactly getting to the intent of what the question here is, using our technology to reduce rates, and this will be rolled in overtime.”
Musk completed that Tesla will offer an excellent discount for those who use the Autopilot under this insurance program.