Elon Musk is set to unveil Tesla’s long-awaited fully-autonomous Robotaxi/Cybercab at the company’s ‘We, Robot’ event in a matter of minutes. Watch the stream here, and we’ll be updating this piece with news as it happens.
7:55 pm PT: And here it is!
Tesla
Elon Musk: “As you can see, I just arrived in the Robotaxi, the Cybercab. There’s 20 more where that came from. There’s no steering wheel or pedals.”
7:43 pm PT: 2.2 million people twiddling their thumbs
How are we all loving this hold music? You know what’d be cool though? A Tesla presentation instead.
Tesla
7:21 pm PT: Anticipation
The promise has always been intoxicating: a fleet of fully independent self-driving cars could revolutionize urban transport. Cheaper and theoretically much safer than human drivers, a proper robotaxi network could eventually replace car ownership.
Why own a car and fuss about parking and servicing it, when door-to-door A to B transport is available cheaply, on-demand, and capable of operating under swarm intelligence models that could eventually make it a lot faster as well?
Execution has been much tougher. Elon Musk has famously promised Tesla’s big-data Autopilot system would be ready for full hands-off, eyes-off autonomy many times over the last 6-7 years, and each of these predicted dates has sailed past. “Full self-driving” Teslas still don’t fully self-drive.
But the concept is key to Tesla’s sky-high market valuation, so anticipation for today’s event is very high. Given the notoriously difficult problem and obvious safety risks inherent in this challenge, the latest Autopilot systems do an absolutely incredible job where they’re currently available, but they still require regular human intervention.
And there’s a toll: upwards of 44 people have died to date in crashes where Autopilot was in full control of the vehicle, underscoring the gravity of this undertaking. Musk maintains that the cars are safer per mile than human drivers, but that’s a difficult claim to confirm, since Tesla’s data isn’t public, and the system currently hands control back to human drivers when sh#t appears to be approaching the fan.
Other companies like Waymo have rolled out commercial driverless robotaxi services – indeed, they’ve been out there for four years now without human safety drivers on board. But they’ve done so in geofenced areas, with human operators ready to take over when the cars can’t work out what to do.
It’s unclear exactly what Tesla’s plans are, but Musk has spoken at length about the idea that your 2022 Model Y should be able to go out and earn a living by itself while you’re at work. And he’s long promised that a Robotaxi without any steering wheel at all is key to Tesla’s future plans.
As with many Tesla initiatives, there’s a sense here that he’s probably pushed the Robotaxi team to deliver the impossible, under a terrifyingly short timeline.
So let’s see what the latest promises look like, keeping an appropriate degree of skepticism about any dates mentioned…
6:52 pm PT – Livestream link
The stream is set to go live in a few minutes, watch here! Refresh this page, as we’ll be updating it throughout the presentation – and join the discussion in the comments below!
Source: Tesla
