Elon Musk has spent years telling Tesla owners that their cars could one day earn them passive income as autonomous robotaxis, a promise roughly as reliable as a "full self-driving" beta release date. But during Tuesday's third-quarter earnings call, Tesla finally attached an actual deadline to the dream - or at least a quarter.

According to Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP for Autonomous Driving, owners will be able to add their own vehicles to the company's robotaxi fleet in the second quarter of 2027. Here's his exact quote, emphasis ours: "Like I mentioned earlier, the software for Cybercabs and Model Y is the same. And pretty soon we'll be able to release the same software as part of the V15 release to customers. The only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer Model Y can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous. We suspect somewhere around Q2 next year is when we can turn on some of the first customer vehicles to be part of the robotaxi fleet."

It's worth marking this deadline down, if only because Tesla will likely sail right past it. When it comes to autonomous driving and robotaxis, Musk has a well-documented pattern: bold, short-term deadlines that slip by years - or simply never arrive. Tesla has made steady, incremental progress on the tech behind its consumer driver-assistance features, but the long-promised "unsupervised" Full Self-Driving remains stubbornly unfulfilled.

Flash back to 2019, when Musk stood on stage at the company's first AI Day and vowed that customer-owned vehicles could join a "Tesla Network" of robotaxis, earning owners passive income while driving around autonomously looking for fares. He likened it to Uber or Airbnb. He also said that by 2020, a "million" Tesla robotaxis would be on the road. Neither promise has come true. Today, Tesla has a few hundred Robotaxis in Texas and Florida - some still carrying human safety monitors - plus several dozen fully driverless Cybercabs in Austin.

Still, FSD growth was a bright spot this quarter. Tesla reported that more people buying new Teslas in North America are opting for Full Self-Driving (Supervised) - over 75 percent of new buyers picked the feature, a jump of almost 20 percentage points compared to last quarter. The rest of the earnings report was less rosy: vehicle sales were down, revenue flatlined, and profits dipped.

Tesla also unveiled a new Robotaxi safety website, claiming it has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously. That's up from the 380,000 unsupervised miles it reported in July.

Even if Tesla does open its fleet to customer-owned vehicles, major regulatory hurdles remain. Unsupervised autonomous ride-hailing requires specific local and state permits. Insurance may be difficult to obtain. And in most places, it's still illegal for individuals or outside companies to use their own self-driving cars as driverless taxis or passenger rides.

Then there's the tension between Tesla's own owners. Older Model 3 and Y vehicles without the latest full-self-driving hardware suites (or AI compute infrastructure) are constrained by hardware capability. Dedicated vehicles like the Cybercab are built specifically for driverless passenger service, whereas consumer vehicles require additional software layers to guarantee safety without human intervention.

Tesla might be confident it can clear every technical and legal hurdle by Q2 2027. But history suggests this could easily become just another deadline that quietly slips by - right around the time your Model Y starts paying for itself.