Comments on Tesla’s Future Self-Driving Autonomous Vehicles and Their Importance for the American Automobile Industry (Extended Abstract)

Tesla will reveal its long-promised robotaxi on August 8th, Elon Musk just posted on X. The forthcoming self-drive vehicle is said to be built on the company’s platform.

Musk speculated in the book that a fully self-piloted vehicle would make the cheap EV irrelevant, and that he could put the EV on hold and use the robotaxi.

In a “master plan” posted by Musk that year, he outlined a (still) futuristic scenario in which Tesla owners could share their autonomous vehicles with others. “When true self-driving is approved by regulators,” he wrote, customers would “be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation.” In 2019, Musk told a room full of investors that by the next year, the automaker would have “over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware.” That didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s driver assistance tech, called Full Self-Driving, is technically only a “level 2” on the five-point autonomy scale, meaning the car can pilot itself only with driver supervision. Tesla’s latest self-driving software update is the first to not be labeled as “beta” by the automaker.

The National Transportation Safety Board, the US’s transportation safety watchdog, has been very critical of driver assistance technology fromTesla. A two-year investigation by the nation’s top road safety regulator concluded late last year with a determination that Tesla’s technology could be misused by drivers because it didn’t force them to pay sufficient attention while driving. Over-the-air software updates were pushed out to customers by Tesla, which said it didn’t agree with regulators. Tesla maintains that its driver assistance features are safer than human drivers.

“We are focused on bringing the next generation platform to market as quickly as we can, with the plan to start production at Gigafactory Texas,” Tesla said in a note to shareholders. The platform will allow for more innovation in the way vehicles are manufactured.

Musk said that if there weren’t trade barriers, they would demolish most other car companies in the world. They are very good.

But Musk logged on to X to deny at least part of the Reuters story. He did not say what the news agency got wrong. He posted on his page that the next product release would be focused on robotaxis.

What’s more, other autonomous vehicle developers have faced serious growing pains in the last half-decade. A technology that was supposed to be a thing of the past proved to be more expensive than anticipated. Today, years after most major auto and tech manufacturers pledged self-driving software, just a few major players remain. After billions of dollars in dedicated research and development and more than 6 million miles driving, a spinoff of the giant company called Waymo only offers paid taxi rides in two cities, Phoenix and San Francisco, though it plans to launch in Austin, Texas, Los Angeles and the wider San Francisco Bay Area Another robotaxi competitor, General Motors’ Cruise, has put its entire service on pause after a driverless taxi struck and injured a pedestrian, which led to a clash with California regulators. The competitors have been working on the problem of autopilot for years, but ifTesla wanted to go ahead and start its own service, it would be more ambitious than these competitors.