Elon Musk teases Tesla robotaxi – GWC Mag

Dive Brief:

• With little detail and a lot of fanfare, Elon Musk announced via X on Friday that Tesla will unveil a robotaxi on Aug. 8.
• The CEO didn’t offer any additional information in the post. But he later shared a link to Tesla’s “Master Plan, Part Deux” that he penned in July 2016, which placed an emphasis on the EV maker’s autonomous vehicle plans and expected ride-hailing fleet operations.
• Tesla will enter a growing robotaxi market, competing with Alphabet-owned Waymo, General Motors subsidiary Cruise and Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 developed in partnership with Motional, among others.

Dive Insight:

Musk’s Friday announcement comes about five years after he told investors Tesla expected to have one million robotaxis on the road equipped with self-driving hardware in 2020.

“We believe we’ll have the most profitable autonomous taxi on the market,” he said during an earnings call in April 2019. Despite that bold claim, the EV maker didn’t launch a robotaxi in 2020, and self-driving cars still face a number of technology, safety and regulatory hurdles today.

In a response to a post on X last week, Musk admitted it has been “staggeringly difficult to make generalized self-driving work.”

“The investment in training compute, gigantic data pipelines and vast video storage will be well over $10B cumulatively this year,” he wrote. “But that is nothing compared to the ~quarter trillion dollars in cars on the road with Tesla-designed AI inference computers being trained by their drivers.”

Autonomous-vehicle developers have also faced legal and regulatory challenges due to safety. General Motors Co., for example, overhauled its Cruise division last year after a severe accident in San Francisco involved one of its autonomous vehicles. The company is preparing to resume Cruise tests in Phoenix, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Tesla on Monday settled a wrongful death lawsuit that alleged its Autopilot feature was responsible for a 2018 fatal crash, CNBC reports. The company has filed to seal the terms of the settlement.