Recently Tesla announced that all of their cars produced from the announcement onwards would be fitted with full self-driving hardware. We’re sure that some enterprising owners are probably thinking that this would be great if they could use it with ride-sharing services to make some money, but Tesla is having none of that.
According to the fine print on Tesla’s website, it reads, “Please note that using a self-driving Tesla for car-sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.” What this means is that you want to use your self-driving Tesla with other services like Uber or Lyft, Tesla is saying no you can’t.
However from the wording it sounds like if you were to drive the car manually, using it for revenue purposes like with other services should be fine, or at least that’s our interpretation. It is unclear as to how exactly Tesla plans on preventing this from happening, but no doubt the company is hoping to compete with the likes of Uber who have been testing self-driving cars as well.
Tesla’s interest in the ride-sharing business was announced earlier this year but it looks like it will only be in 2017 that we will find out more about it.
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