HANDSTri-Cities, Tennessee · handsfreefsd.app
Your ride is a Tesla running Full Self-Driving.
A trained operator supervises every mile — hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, exactly as the law requires. The car does the driving, and we publish the data on how well it did. That is the company we are building; we have not carried anyone yet.
Read this first
We are not a robotaxi. Not yet.
Full Self-Driving is, today, a driver-assistance system. A licensed human sits in the driver's seat of every HandsFree car, hands on the wheel, legally and practically responsible for the vehicle at all times.
Plenty of rideshare drivers already run FSD quietly and hope you don't notice. We do the opposite: we tell you before you get in, we train for it, we measure it, and we put the results on the internet where anyone can pick them apart.
When the software is certified to drive without a person — and that is coming — you'll be able to check our record going back years instead of taking a press release at face value.
How we actually run it →- A licensed operator is in the driver's seat, belted, on every single trip
- Hands stay on the wheel the whole time Full Self-Driving is engaged
- The operator says out loud that it is running, before the car moves
- Any rider can ask for it off, at no extra cost and with no argument
- Every takeover is written down with its cause, and none are quietly dropped
These are the rules, not results. What we measure against them gets published on the telemetry page from our first week of service.
The ride
Four things happen. None of them are a surprise.
The whole point of this company is that you know exactly what you're getting into. Literally.
You book, and you're told what car and who's in it
Model, plate, colour, operator name and, as soon as there are 30 days of them, their takeover record. Not a first name and a star rating — the actual numbers.
The operator engages FSD and says so out loud
Every trip starts with one sentence: "I'm running Full Self-Driving — I'm still driving, I just have help." If you'd rather they drove it manually, say the word and they will. No argument, no upsell, no difference in price.
The screen faces you
A second display in the back shows you what the car sees — the lane lines, the other vehicles, the planned path. We think most people will watch it the whole way. That's the point.
The trip gets logged, and the log goes public
Miles, software version, interventions, and why each one happened. Aggregated weekly, published, downloadable. Your name and your pickup address never leave our system.
This is the chart that goes here, and it stays empty until our own cars have filled it. One bar per Full Self-Driving version, on our roads, with our operators.
| Version | Miles | Takeovers / 1k mi |
|---|---|---|
| awaiting first week | — | — |
Lower will be better. The scale will be fixed across versions so the bars stay comparable — a chart that rescales itself makes every release look like a breakthrough.
Telemetry
The marketing is the data.
Every rideshare company on earth tells you it's safe. None of them show you the working. We will show you the working, including the bad weeks. Here is exactly what we have committed to publishing, before we have a single number to put in it.
- Every intervention categorised and published — construction, weather, a bad merge, an operator being cautious
- Version-over-version comparison, so you can see whether an update actually helped
- Route-level heat map of where the cars need a human most often
- Raw CSV export. Take it, argue with it, publish your own analysis
Straight comparison
Where we're better, and where we're not
A comparison table that only flatters us would be worth nothing to you. The other three columns are our reading of public information in August 2026, not their own words — tell us if we've got any of it wrong.
| HandsFree | UberX / Lyft | Waymo | Tesla Robotaxi | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available in the Tri-Cities | At launch | Yes | No | No |
| Car you'll actually get | Tesla, always | Whatever shows up | Jaguar I-PACE | Model Y |
| Runs on autonomy software | Every mile | Down to the individual driver | Every mile | Every mile |
| Human responsible for the car | Yes — and told to you | Yes | No | Varies by city |
| Publishes its safety data | Weekly, raw — from day one | Not per-driver | Selected reports | Selected reports |
| Price vs UberX | About the same | Baseline | Higher | Lower |
| Can handle a snowstorm | Human takes over | Yes | Limits service | Limits service |
| Will haul your couch | No | Maybe | No | No |
Waymo and Tesla Robotaxi are genuinely driverless in the metros they serve. They are not here, and on current expansion patterns they will not be here for years. That gap is the entire business.
The rolling billboard
Every car winks at you.
There will be an LED panel in the rear glass of every HandsFree car. It runs the oldest gag there is — the little circle you make with your fingers and hold up to your eye, daring somebody to look.
On a car that's driving itself, a hand doing anything other than gripping the wheel is the whole joke. That's the logo, that's the sign, and that's the advertising. We won't buy billboards. The cars are the billboards, and once they're running they drive past everyone in town all day.
Live render of the panel that goes in the rear glass — 16×64, USB-powered, no strobe.
01 / RIDERS
Get where you're going in a Tesla, for UberX money
Airport runs, downtown Johnson City, ETSU, the Kingsport commute, Bristol race weekends. Booking direct will skip the platform fee entirely.
- Flat, quoted fare before you commit — no surge
- Rear screen showing what the car sees
- Same price whether it's on FSD or not
02 / OWNERS & OPERATORS
You have a Tesla. Put it to work without doing the work.
Two ways in: hand us your car and take a cut, or drive one of ours and keep the majority of the fare. Both are designed so the FSD subscription, the commercial cover and the boring parts are all sorted before anyone carries a passenger. None of it is arranged yet — the drive page says exactly what does and does not exist today.
- FSD subscription covered on every car we put in the fleet
- Commercial cover that names rideshare — in place before any car carries a fare
- Charging, cleaning, tyres, service — ours
Who's behind it
We're the people who read the release notes.
HandsFree is run by Tesla owners and tech people, not a transport holding company that noticed EVs were cheap to run.
We've watched Full Self-Driving go from something that couldn't handle a roundabout to something that drives a two-hour trip untouched — as owners, not as a company. We read every release note and argue about every version. Turning that into a ride service is the obvious move: it's the only rideshare where knowing the software inside out is actually the product.
The questions everyone asks
Yes, we've heard that one
So is the car driving itself or not?
The car is doing the steering, braking, accelerating and lane changes. A licensed human is in the driver's seat with hands on the wheel, watching, and can take over instantly — and legally, that person is the driver. Both of those things are true at once. Anyone who tells you it's simpler than that is selling something.
Is it safer than a normal driver?
Our honest answer: we don't know yet, and neither does anyone else. What we will be able to tell you is exactly how often our cars needed a human, on which roads, in what weather, and whether that is getting better. The format is already up on the telemetry page, waiting for its first week of data. Draw your own conclusion — we would rather you did that than trust us.
What if I don't want the self-driving on?
Say so and the operator turns it off. Same fare, no attitude. We expect a fair few people to ask the first time — and once we have carried enough riders to know the real number, it goes on the telemetry page like everything else.
Does it cost more?
It shouldn't be. We intend to price against UberX, and booking direct skips the platform's cut, so we expect a lot of routes to land slightly cheaper. Nothing is bookable yet — you can see the rates we mean to open with on the ride page.
What happens when the cars go fully driverless?
Our operators move into remote support and fleet ops, and the fare drops hard. Anyone who drives for us will be told that this is the plan before they sign anything — because the alternative is people finding out from a press release.
handsfreefsd.app
Ride in the future. Watch it work.
Same price as a normal rideshare, considerably more interesting, and not open yet. Leave your name and you'll hear from us once rather than weekly.