Lest we thought that Elon Musk was finally done with the Bay Area, having closed down Xitter's offices and moved several of his companies to Texas, he's now claiming that Tesla's robotaxis will be coming to compete with Waymo soon.

This all may just be more hand-waving and mendacity on the part of Musk, or just careless optimism, but in a tweet-reply Wednesday evening to a question about when Tesla's Robotaxis will arrive in the Bay Area, Musk said, "Waiting on regulatory approvals, probably in a month or two."

That seems more than a little optimistic given the shaky rollout of Tesla Robotaxis in Austin the last couple weeks, and when we're talking about a regulatory environment in California that's been burned already by issues with Cruise's robotaxis, which turned out to have quite a few more glitches than competitor Waymo. And Cruise's autonomous taxis actually used LiDAR technology, the laser-based scanners that create 3D maps around the robot cars to detect people, objects, and other cars.

Tesla has tried a different approach that seems far from proven, opting for machine learning combined with visual sensors — and, essentially, an upgrade to its pre-existing, full-self-driving software. Already in Austin, where Tesla Robotaxi service rolled out to a select few users on June 22, there have been over a dozen recorded incidents of the autonomous Teslas doing odd and dangerous things, including dropping off a passenger in the middle of an intersection, and stopping abruptly on a busy thoroughfare.

As NBC News reports, Tesla seems to be taking advantage of the current lax regulation around autonomous vehicles in Texas — ahead of a new state law that is set to take effect September 1. In fact, seven Texas lawmakers sent a letter to Tesla on June 18 asking the company to delay their testing of the robotaxis until September, but that went ignored.

Last week, as Endgadget reported and as documented in the video below, a Tesla Robotaxi inexplicably drove into a parked car in an Austin parking lot, and was then stopped by a safety operator. (During this testing phase, no driver sits in the driver's seat, but a Tesla employee sits in the passenger seat and has the ability to stop the car in an emergency.)

It appeared that the Tesla's bumber only grazed the parked car and did not damage it.

In another video, a Tesla Robotaxi can be seen stopping abruptly after passing a police car with flashing lights that was parked off to the side of the road. The Tesla was on a busy four-lane road at the time, and stopped in the middle of its lane.

The whole thing feels rushed, and is perhaps being hurried because of Tesla's flagging stock price and reportedly slow sales of its EVs and Cybertrucks — following Elon's hard swing to the right and brief foray into Trump's White House.  As PCMag notes, "The reports come as the success of Tesla's robotaxi division may be increasingly integral to the future of the company."

Any plan to begin testing in California could be thwarted by a serious safety incident or injury in Austin, but the small scale of the current testing phase could help them avoid that — reportedly only Musk devotees and acolytes were granted invitations to use the Robotaxi service for now.

As the Chronicle reports, Tesla also has only two out of six required permits it would need to start offering autonomous taxi rides in San Francisco and elsewhere, alongside Waymo. And Waymo spent several years testing its vehicles and mapping SF's streets before its service rolled out to the public.

"What matters is not individual demonstrations. It’s statistics," says Brad Templeton, a consultant in the autonomous vehicle industry, speaking to NBC News. Templeton worked on Google's autonomous vehicle project before it was even called Waymo, and he cautions that regulators are only interested in seeing how these vehicles perform over the long term, after millions of miles driven.

Templeton also noted that Musk's most devoted fans, including those who have gotten to take rides in the cars, are "all fairly convinced that [the Tesla technology is] just on the cusp of being ready, and they get really annoyed when other people don’t see it."

Musk is clearly playing into that with his "month or two" comment. We'll see what a month or two brings as even city councilmembers in Austin are sounding alarm bells.

"We’ve been seeing chaos unfold," says Austin City Councilmember Zo Qadri, speaking to NBC News. "We have a lot of constituents who are very angry."

Another councilmember, Vanessa Fuentes, who is also mayor pro tem of Austin, says that even in this small-scale test, "There are just a lot of errors. They have proven that the technology they have is unsafe for Austinites."

Fuentes adds, in comments to NBC, "Tesla has had no regard for public input or working with our city, and unfortunately, I’m not OK having this done at the expense of Austinites’ safety."

Previously: Elon Musk Declares He’s Starting a New Political Party, Tesla Promptly Loses $68 Billion In Value In One Day

Top image: Photo via Tesla Robotaxi