For Tesla’s latest high-profile event, Elon Musk wanted the Hollywood treatment. On Thursday evening, the CEO unveiled a prototype of the automaker’s “robotaxi” during the “We, Robot” event on the Warner Bros. film studio lot. Discovery in Burbank, California.
The vehicle is intended to be fully autonomous, without the need for a human driver, like other self-driving taxis currently operating in select markets, such as Google’s Waymo fleets and General Motors’ Cruise fleets. Musk initially announced that the demo of Tesla’s version would take place on August 8, but postponed the presentation by two months. In July, he tweeted that the unveiling had been delayed due to “a major design change to the front end” of the car, and because “extra time allows us to show off a few other things.” At the end of September he tweeted that the robotaxi would be “one for the history books.”
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As is typical for Musk, the unveiling took place about an hour later than planned. Before taking the stage, Musk showed off the autonomous driving capabilities of the Robotaxi, or Cybercab, by getting into the sleek silver vehicle with butterfly doors and taking it for a ride around.
Robotaxi is premium point-to-point electric transport, accessible to everyone pic.twitter.com/oLykwaaTHm
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 11, 2024
Musk said the Cybercab is expected to cost less than $30,000 and be in production before 2027, while admitting he tended to be “a little bit optimistic about the timeframes.” He also said that fully autonomous, unattended vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y, would hit the roads in California and Texas next year.
Tesla also introduced the Robovan, essentially a sleek bus that Musk said would seat 20 people. “Can you imagine walking down the streets and you see this coming towards you?” he told the crowd gathered in Burbank. “That would be sick.”
Before Tesla’s latest reveal, Musk debuted Optimus, a “humanoid friend” that he said would cost between $28,000 and $30,000. Although he didn’t mention a date when the robot would be available, the CEO ended his speech by showing a group of Optimus dancing to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” and had the robots serve drinks to attendees later in the evening.
Although the event was filled with Musk’s ambitious predictions and hip revelations, the video presentation began with a lengthy disclaimer stating that “forward-looking statements” were “not guarantees.”
Tesla: The Cybercab will cost less than $30k and be built before 2027
Tesla: Full Self-Driving Unsupervised in the Tesla Model 3 and Y next year
Tesla: The humanoid robot will be the biggest product ever of any kind
Also Tesla: pic.twitter.com/TTb8zdsqXE
— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) October 11, 2024
Dan O’Dowd, billionaire co-founder of Green Hills Software and founder of the Dawn Project, which campaigns “to eliminate unsafe software from safety-critical systems” and has raised alarms about Tesla’s driver assistance features, was among those not covered by the were impressed.
Musk has touted autonomous driving technology as key to Tesla’s future, saying in 2022 that the company is “basically worth zero” if it can’t make self-driving cars. But the automaker has struggled to realize its vision of fully autonomous vehicles, consistently missing its overly optimistic (or simply unfounded) predictions about when Tesla would reach certain benchmarks. In 2016 he claimed that a Tesla could drive across the US without human assistance by the end of 2017 – eight years later that still hasn’t happened. Also in 2016, Tesla faked a video demonstration of self-driving technology, according to an engineer who later testified in a lawsuit against the company. Tesla has removed the video from its website.
The concept of a Tesla “robotaxi” was first mooted during a 2019 presentation in which Musk proclaimed that Teslas equipped with the company’s “Full Self-Driving” (or FSD) software could soon serve as self-driving taxis, with owners would earn passive income. income by sending them out into the world to collect rates. “Next year we will certainly have more than a million robotaxis on the road,” he speculated. That didn’t happen either. And since then, Tesla’s claims and marketing around its driver assistance systems have been investigated by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, the company is facing a slew of lawsuits alleging injury or death to a third party was caused by a Tesla with defective “self-driving” features. (During a test drive to see how the technology functions, Rolling stone found that FSD was prone to frequent and dangerous errors when maneuvering on streets and highways.) Tesla has fought the lawsuits, maintaining that it is not liable for accidents involving self-driving features because the responsibility lies with the driver.
It’s unclear whether Musk or Tesla leadership still believes that privately owned Teslas with FSD could eventually be upgraded to serve as autonomous taxis, but the rollout of a “robotaxi” built for that specific purpose seems to indicate that they distance themselves from that original idea. However, if the goal is to compete with brands like Waymo, Tesla faces an uphill battle: Waymo vehicles travel 28,311 miles between disconnections, moments when the technology fails or a human operator must step in and take manual control. By comparison, Tesla owners who publicly collect their FSD driving data find that the latest versions of the software only travel 65 city miles between “critical pullbacks,” incidents where they must take control to avoid an illegal maneuver or collision. Waymo and other self-driving taxis currently in use are equipped with an expensive array of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and radar sensors, while Tesla has long maintained a “video-only” approach to autonomous driving systems.
“Tesla is years behind Waymo,” says O’Dowd Rolling stone. “As usual, Elon Musk is trying to participate in the Tour de France on a tricycle.”
Whether Tesla shareholders will be swayed by Musk’s latest song and dance will certainly be reflected in the stock price movement on Friday. Ahead of the robotaxi event, investors were divided over its possible outcome. Shares of Tesla fell more than eight percent in July when the demo was postponed until October, indicating the vehicle’s prospects could propel Tesla to the moon — or crash it to Earth.
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