The Robot Axis Project: How a Fully Self-Driving Autonomous Vehicle Would Replace the Human-Robot System
An idiosyncratic billionaire takes to the stage (with, perhaps, a humanoid robot by his side?) to unveil a futuristic technology that he promises will transform the world — a vision alternately celebrated, mocked and feared.
The solution to the problem of keeping a Cybercab clean without the assistance of a human driver is shown in the video depictions of the interior cleaning. The robotaxi would also be charged wirelessly, through inductive charging, Musk said. But a timeline for both tech features went unmentioned.
Tesla makes money selling electric vehicles — in fact, its profit margins on its cars, which are consistently in the double digits, are enviable for an automaker. But Musk has his eye on the much fatter profit margins of the software industry.
Musk is promising something different. He said that the cybercab will be on the market by 2026, and that fully self driving cars will be launched in Texas and California next year. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving would come first. He promised that the price of the Cybercab would be less than $30,000. Potential owners would be like shepherds, tending to their flock of small cabs in the street.
Analyst George Gianarikas of Canaccord Genuity Group notes that Musk’s approach requires billions of dollars of upfront investment in AI, but much cheaper hardware on vehicles. If there are millions of robotaxis on the road, the combination would pay off.
“The value of a fully electric autonomous fleet is generally gigantic — boggles the mind, really.” He said that to investors in 2021. “That will be one of the most valuable things that’s ever done in the history of civilization.”
There are lots of reasons to be skeptical about a fleet of Musk’s vehicles, but there is also a track record of proving skeptics wrong.
While other companies, such as Cruise and Waymo, have racked up millions of miles with their self-drive vehicles, Musk’s company lags behind. To be sure, robotaxis have had a bumpy rollout, with numerous incidents of blocked vehicles, traffic jams, and even a handful of injuries. Federal safety regulators are probing several major players to discern whether the technology powering these vehicles is safe or should be recalled.
Even for those companies, robotaxis aren’t profitable yet. The auto market research giant J.D. Power recently surveyed people who have ridden in robotaxis and found that while passengers generally liked the experience, they don’t find the taxis practical. Until they’re cheaper and cover more ground, the pollsters concluded, “the service will remain a novelty transportation method.”
Other companies use high-tech sensors and radar, while Musk chose inexpensive cameras to be the basis of his system. Other companies add human-designed rules and guardrails to their artificial intelligence systems, and Musk has embracedend-to-end learning where the artificial intelligence learns from raw data.
According to Aurora’s email, the Aurora CPO said that the company uses a “train and pray approach,” where it fixes a problem with more data. “We find this to be problematic in a safety-critical industry where you need confidence and proof you’ve actually fixed it.”
Anderson helped launch the first partial-automated system in the world, the Aurora email states. An ex-Tesla executive is on the team of Waymo.
The Musk-Gianarikas Story: The Robotaxi Experiment at the CERN SPS, and What Can Regulators Tell Us About It?
The United States still has no federal laws governing self-driving, so a patchwork of state and city regulators set the boundaries of what companies can and cannot do.
Musk has always acknowledged that achieving full self-driving is not just a matter of technological innovation; if regulators aren’t convinced a robotaxi fleet is safe, it isn’t going anywhere.
The robotaxi is a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, lacking a steering wheel or pedals, meaning it will need approval from regulators before going into production. The doors were open like butterfly wings and the small cabin was only large enough for two people. There was no steering wheel, pedals, or plug in the car, Musk said.
Software could be affected by governmental concerns. Gianarikas says regulators who dig into the coding of a system built by “end-to-end” deep learning might not like what they find.
“You can imagine a scenario where [regulators] just kind of have this moment, like ‘What? You don’t … have any hard-coded software rules?” he says. How do you control it?
We, Robot: Autonomous Vehicles, a Time-Saver for Human-Like Robots and the Future of Audiovisuals
The event is called “We, Robot” to honor a famous short story collection that examines the ethical and psychological aspects of building increasingly human-like robots. It is also the title of a Will Smith movie.
There is a possibility that the reveal will feature a robot designed to do repetitive tasks like mowing the lawn.
Dan Ives, an analyst and a long-time Tesla bull, will be in attendance on Thursday night. He is more interested in whether Musk can demonstrate a fully self-sufficient vehicle that works.
During the event, Musk pitched the idea of autonomous cars as primarily a time-saver. “Think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car,” he said, “and the time they will get back that they can now spend on their books or watching a movie or doing work or whatever.”
Musk has pulled off many victories, even though he was behind. Model 3 production and the Cybertruck early success are two recent examples of how Musk has exceeded expectations.
Musk said that autonomous cars are expected to be 10-20 times safer than human-driven vehicles and could cost as low as $0.20 per mile, compared to the $1 per mile for city buses.
Phil Koopman, an audiovisuals expert from Carnegie Mellon, said in his newsletter this morning that Prototype hardware that works in a limited demo is cool. Hardware isn’t the limit to autonomously driving vehicles. Software is the long pole in the tent.”
Reverse Joni Mitchell-ing: The Tesla Cybercab: Unanswered Questions about Safety and Liability of the Self-Driving Car
The analyst dismissed any decline in the stock price as a result of the event, as it would eventually correct itself. “We strongly disagree with the notion that last night was a disappointment,” he wrote Friday, “as we would argue the opposite seeing Cybercab with our own eyes and the massive improvements in Optimus which we interacted with throughout the evening.”
Since then, interest rates have skyrocketed, the buckets of ample venture capital funding have dried up, and most of the major players working on this technology have since reconfigured their timelines to account for how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove they can be safer than humans. Even Waymo, which is far and away the leader in the space, is taking things real slowly, one city at a time. The company is still trying to figure out where the highways are.
His pitch went from utopian to even more so last night, as images of parking lots were transformed into gardens on giant screens above him. (I call this “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”)
He said if you could see that future, you would be like, yes, I wish I could be there now.
It was kind of nice to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” articulate a brighter vision for the future, but after the event, it’s even less clear how we’ll get there. We did not know how he would overcome the huge obstacles in his path. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the issues that went unresolved:
Source: The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that
Comments on “Critical Drivers’ Safety” by Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, and Tomography of his Defendant, Cybercab
It is not a full assessment of the surface. Kyle Vogt, the ex-CEO of Cruise, posted on X a pretty thorough list of his own questions for Tesla, most of which went completely unanswered. And this coming from a guy who was pushed out of his own company for screwing up the response to one of those hard-to-predict edge cases (a human driver struck a pedestrian, sending her flying into the path of one of Cruise’s robotaxis).
Musk might meet a similar fate, even though he fumbled the ball so badly. The company has pushed into automated technology that has resulted in death and destruction. So far, he has been successful in avoiding those consequences.
He didn’t do those things. He put on a show, complete with fake movie posters, delicious food, and robot bartender, which looked like it would be a great show. He fell back onto the tired promises of a fully self-sufficient vehicle that was just two years away.
He could have provided an ounce of detail about the Cybercab’s technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. And he could have shocked the industry and surprised many of his doubters by embracing lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for every other driverless vehicle on Earth.
He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly-wing doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with impressive-looking margins.
The company could have released comprehensive safety data, showing real progress for the driver- assistance feature, instead of all the data that is out there making it look terrible.
Tesla’s First Autonomous Production Event: The Discovery of a Self-Driving Model of the Next Generation of Electric Vehicles
The event is happening at a time when upstart Chinese firms are exporting inexpensive cars to other countries such as the United States, which poses a serious threat to the electric car industry in this country. The company has had a poor quarter compared to analysts’ expectations. The automaker laid off some 14,000 employees earlier this year, many working on the core competencies of electric vehicle production, including batteries and charging infrastructure. A lot of executives have left the company in the past few weeks.
Musk referred to the entire setup as a set, far from the messy, busy streets where one day an autonomously driven vehicle might one day be challenged to drive.
Almost an hour after Tesla had said the debut event would begin, Musk was escorted by a man dressed as an astronaut to the butterfly doors of the silver prototype. He took a quick, seemingly driverless jaunt through the dark, ghostly streets of the Warner Bros. Studios in Southern California, before emerging from the car to take the stage.
Movie studios are where Hollywood spins fantastical worlds out of fancy camera angles and special effects. So where better to show off the sleek, self-driving car that Musk claims will be in production in just three years?