Tesla will unveil its Robotaxi product at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, CA, on October 10th, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Tesla has been using its Giga Texas facility for its unveilings in recent years, after many years of doing them in Calfornia, where the company was founded and where its design and engineering departments remain.
Many of these happened in or around Hawthorne, California, where the Tesla Design Studio is – so it makes sense that nonpublic concepts would be housed in the same area.
But Tesla will branch out to another company’s facility for it’s October 10th unveiling, choosing to stage it at a large movie set in nearby Burbank, on the north end of the LA area.
Tesla may have chosen the location due to its simulation of a suburban neighborhood. There are several houses and a simulation of a small-town downtown area. The idea could be to demonstrate to attendees what it might be like to get picked up by a robotaxi outside your home, and taken downtown for a night out.
Using a smaller, controlled location also allows Tesla to map the area extensively, which it has been doing recently. This reduces the likelihood of encountering difficulties during the demonstration, where Tesla won’t have to deal with normal road traffic.
Other robotaxis like Waymo do use pre-mapped areas, but these are on public roads with normal traffic and other road users.
Despite Tesla’s usual use of its own locations, this isn’t the first time Tesla has done an event at a Hollywood studio.
When it first unveiled its solar roof product in 2016, the event was at Universal Studios, just a few miles away from Warner Bros. Studios. That event was also in a fake movie neighborhood – on the set used to film Desperate Housewives.
The location for that presentation could have been a premonition, as at the event, Tesla promised four separate roof styles, only one of which ever materialized. Tesla was in the mood to do a little movie magic of their own, that day.
Solar roof went on to take a long time to get off the ground, and never became a particularly high-volume product for Tesla, eight years later. Hopefully for Tesla, the robotaxi won’t suffer the same fate.
Similarly, Tesla has been promising owners that they would be able to use their vehicles as revenue-earning robotaxis since before the Solar Roof was unveiled. That promise has also not yet materialized – and Tesla has repurposed the word “robotaxi” to refer to this specialized product, coming out October 10th, and hasn’t said much about whether owners of other vehicles will be able to use them as self-driving taxis, should the company ever solve self-driving (which will happen next year, according to CEO Elon Musk, who has made the same promise every year for about a decade now).
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