This is at least the fifth time that the Tesla CEO has declared he’d have self-driving cars this year, though if it ends up being true, at least they would start rolling in Texas and not San Francisco.

Electric car company Tesla had its quarterly earnings call Wednesday, and NBC Bay Area reports that CEO Elon Musk claimed that Tesla would launch self-driving robotaxis this year.  The car model is unsurprisingly called “Cybercab,” and as NBC Bay Area points out, the prototype has already been on display at the Santana Row Tesla showroom in San Jose. The automobile publication Car and Driver says that the service would only launch in Austin, Texas at first — so, this time, San Franciscans will not be the guinea pigs for a self-driving experiment.

Though TechCrunch points out that Musk has made this promise many times before, calling this week’s announcement “the latest in a long line of sky-high promises he has yet to meet about autonomy.”

"I know people said Elon’s the boy who cried wolf," Musk himself said on the earnings call Wednesday, according to Barron’s. "I’m telling you there’s a damn wolf this time and you can drive it… It’s a self-driving wolf."

But Barron’s also has the receipts on all of the times Musk has made similar claims, only for them to turn out to be bullshit. “In November 2018 he said autonomous driving was a year away,” Barron’s notes. “In January 2020, he said it was a few months away. In January 2021, Musk said Tesla’s self-driving software would be better than humans ‘this year.’ In January 2022, Musk said he’d be ‘shocked’ if FSD [full-self-driving] wasn’t better than humans ‘this year.’ In July 2023, he compared himself to the boy who cried wolf and said FSD would be better than humans in 2023.”

And during these years, the Google-owned competitor Waymo has pretty much come through on these promises. You’ll recall the other big robotaxi competitor, GM subsidiary Cruise, had a series of embarrassing mishaps on SF streets, capped off by an incident where their car struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. GM has since pulled Cruise out of the robotaxi market.

So it remains to be seen whether Tesla can play catch-up with Waymo, whether it will fail hard like Cruise, or whether Musk is just making more empty promises.

Regardless, Car and Driver has some photos of these Tesla Cybercabs. These electric vehicles reportedly charge wirelessly instead of via a charging port, so that would be a cool innovation. And the sleek design is significantly less ugly than the Tesla Cybertruck, so that’s an improvement, if and when they ever start rolling in public.

Related: Tesla Temporarily Halts Cybertruck Production, Amidst Rumors of Slumping Demand [SFist]

Image via Tesla