Elon Musk said he hopes to start a service in 2025 that will allow people to hail self-driving Tesla vehicles in California and Texas-so much so that he claims his company has already been testing the service in the Bay Area with employees.

The comments on Wednesday by Tesla regarding its third-quarter earnings call went further than what Musk said two weeks ago during its Cybercab unveiling event. On that stage, Musk pledged that owners of the Model 3 and Model Y would be able to use an "unsupervised" version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software in California and Texas. He said nothing about the ride-hailing network, though, even though Tesla has been teasing that idea for years.

It's unclear whether Tesla would require permission from California's Department of Motor Vehicles to do the tests Musk said his company is already running. The DMV didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

VP of software engineering at Tesla, David Lau said in the call that the cars employees have been hailiing had all had a safety driver at the wheel. And to be clear, no Tesla vehicles can currently drive themselves without human intervention. 

Today, Tesla describes its Full Self-Driving software as an advanced driver assistance system — not a self-driving system like Waymo makes available in its robotaxis. FSD offers some semi-automated capabilities on highways and city streets, but the system still requires the driver's attention and control.

Musk said on the call Tesla would go through the proper regulatory approval process in California before opening such a service to everyday consumers, though he bemoaned the red tape and said he expects the process will be smoother in his home state of Texas. The California Public Utilities Commission has multiple tiers that require approval from the DMV to launch a commercial robotaxi service. In fact, Waymo is the only company permitted to operate a commercial drvierless robotaxi service currently in San Francisco.

Tesla might also extend the service in other states as well by the end of next year, Musk added.

These promises come after years of Musk overpromising on Tesla's ability to develop software to autonomously drive cars. In 2016, he first promised, in since-deleted post, that "all Tesla cars built from now have the-full Self-Driving Hardware." And in the following years, it seemed as though all it would take is a flip of a switch to fill the streets with self-driving cars.

Even the hardware component of that promise hasn't panned out.

Tesla has had to retrofit cars outfitted with those early versions of the so-called "Full Self-Driving" hardware. And Musk admitted on Wednesday's call that cars outfitted with what Tesla calls "Hardware 3" — which it began building into its EVs in 2019 — may not ultimately be able to drive themselves. If Tesla ever reaches the stage where the software is able to control vehicles without human supervision and does not work with Hardware 3, it promised at no cost to its owners to swap out that hardware.