Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the automaker is planning to unveil its new ‘robotaxi’, a next-generation self-driving vehicle, on August 8th.
After the Cybertruck, Tesla has been expected to release two highly anticipated new electric vehicles: a smaller and cheaper electric car, commonly referred to as the “$25,000 Tesla Model 2”; and a new “dedicated robotaxi,” a vehicle designed from the ground up for autonomous driving without any pedals or steering wheel.
When it comes to the robotaxi, Tesla has been talking about making all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 being capable of becoming robotaxis through a software update, but at Tesla’s Cyber Rodeo event in April 2022, Musk announced that Tesla would also build a new vehicle specifically to be a “robotaxi.”
Today, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would unveil the Robotaxi on August 8th:
Interestingly, the announcement comes after a report that Tesla had scrapped its “Model 2” in favor of the Robotaxi.
Musk denied the report, but this announcement seems to be an acceleration of the robotaxi program as Tesla previously talked about an unveiling of the next-gen vehicles at the end of 2024.
Through Walter Issacson’s approved biography of Musk, we learned that Tesla Robotaxi will be “Cybertruck-like”.
Top comment by Max
What I'm not seeing or hearing is any discussion about working with state and local governments to meet necessary permitting and regulations, which you have to do in the States. Uber tried pulling the "ask forgiveness later" in California and they saw what happens (note: the state has an explicit interest in and responsibility for public safety, and they build and maintain roads, so it's not unreasonable for them to have some say). Of course this is all anathema for Musk, but I'd bet that none of it is real until we see documentation -- which would be available to the public -- that Tesla has begun filing for permits.
The book also released a picture of an early design prototype of the vehicle – pictured above.
Electrek’s Take
As I understand it, the idea of a “Tesla Robotaxi” is to design a vehicle optimized for the ground up for driverless ridesharing.
It’s an interesting idea, but it is making some Tesla owners nervous because it could open the door to Tesla focusing on achieving self-driving on this new hardware rather than on its existing vehicle fleet as promised and as sold to customers for years.
In fact, the unveiling is going to tell current FSD owners a lot. If it is unveiled with the same or very similar sensor suite, meaning camera only, it would be good news.
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