On Thursday evening, around 7 pm PDT, Tesla is slated to unveil the newest vehicle in its lineup: one that will be able to drive itself. A purpose-built Tesla robot taxi—a “Cybercab,” in the electric automaker’s parlance—is meant to establish the company as less a manufacturer of cars than a maker of pathbreaking robotics technology. “The way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet,” CEO Elon Musk told Tesla investors in April.
As Musk takes the stage tomorrow at the Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. movie studio in Burbank, California, and attempts to usher that substantial (and difficult!) vision into reality, canny observers should keep watch for information about Tesla’s service that extends beyond the vehicle itself. The robot devil will likely be in the robot details. Ride-hailing services are logistically complex, governed by liability laws and state-by-state regulations. Sometimes, robot taxis are attacked by vandals. To run a robotaxi fleet, Tesla will have to work out all of those pieces.
The Tesla robotaxi has been a long time coming. Musk made his first promise about a self-driving, Uber-like service back in 2019, when he said that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. At the time, the idea was that the automaker would be able to effectively “flip a switch” to transform on-the-road Teslas into autonomous robots able to do their drivers’ bidding—including pick up fares!—during down times. This past April, Musk announced the official Cybercab reveal would take place in August, then he delayed it after saying the vehicle needed design tweaks.
Now, Tesla has made a purpose-built autonomous electric vehicle, owned and operated by the company itself, more central to its future robotaxi fleet. Musk has likened the business model to a mix of Airbnb and Uber, but maintains, as he said in April, that “there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet.”
Tesla has shown renderings depicting what a self-driving robotaxi app might look like. And earlier this year, Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy intimated that the automaker had at least a sense of the challenge ahead, when he acknowledged to investors that Cybercabs will need to be charged, cleaned, and maintained in between ferrying passengers about day and night. Who will do that, and where? And who will pay for it?
A self-driving ride-hail service would put Tesla in direct competition with other tech developers with years’ worth of head starts. Alphabet subsidiary Waymo says it’s providing 100,000 paid trips per week in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It has plans to launch in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, next year. Amazon’s Zoox is testing its purpose-built, toaster-shaped robotaxi in Las Vegas, and has said it will launch an autonomous taxi service later this year.
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