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Elon Musk has been working to make Tesla a "fully self-driving car." Currently, Tesla's advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) include Autopilot and the advanced "Full Self-Driving (FSD)". On April 5, local time, Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter): "Tesla will release a driverless taxi (Robotaxi) product on August 8." "The post is very simple and does not contain any details. After the news was announced, Tesla's stock price rose more than 3% in after-hours trading. Musk has previously publicly predicted that driverless taxis will be more common than regular cars in the future. He believes that "full self-driving capability" is crucial to Tesla, and if it fails to do so, Tesla's value is basically zero.
Tesla's long road to full autonomity
Before Musk announced that "Tesla will release driverless taxis", Reuters, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Tesla adjusted its business strategy and decided to abandon the production plan of the low-cost Model 2 and instead focus on the development of driverless taxi technology. "Elon's instructions are to go all out and develop driverless taxis. The source revealed to Reuters. Another insider expressed optimism about Musk's decision, noting that Musk sees driverless taxis as the future of automobiles. Subsequently, according to CNBC, Musk accused Reuters of "untruthful reporting".
In fact, Tesla's path to fully autonomous development has been extremely difficult. As early as 2015, Musk promised shareholders that Tesla would achieve "full self-driving" within three years, in 2016, Musk pointed out that by the end of 2017, one of Tesla's cars would be able to drive off-road without any human intervention, and in 2017, Tesla released the Autopilot 2.0 system with Autopilot with Autopilot features, which is compatible with all Tesla models, including the latest Model 3. The Autopilot 2.0 system consists of eight cameras for 360-degree visibility and monitoring of the surrounding environment from up to 250 meters. The vehicle's 12 ultrasonic sensors complete the vision system, detecting and sensing hard and soft objects twice as far as the previous generation. In 2019, Musk expects to mass-produce driverless taxis in 2020. Each taxi has a lifespan of 11 years and a range of 160 kilometers, generating $30,000 in profits for Tesla and taxi operators per year.
Musk and Tesla have not fulfilled their promises. At an event in April 2019, Musk said: "I didn't finish on time, it's normal to criticize." In 2021, Tesla officially released the beta version of FSD, also known as "full self-driving", which requires users to pay an additional $12,000 to purchase the system, or it can be purchased through a monthly subscription of up to $199. This system does not turn the car into a self-driving car. When using FSD or FSD Beta, the driver must constantly pay attention to the road conditions and be ready to steer or brake at any time. Until now, Tesla has yet to introduce a driverless taxi, self-driving car, or technology that can transform a car into a "Level 3 autonomous car." Level 3 technology refers to conditional automation, where all driving operations are performed by an autonomous driving system. Depending on the system requirements, the human driver needs to provide a response at the appropriate time.
On March 25 this year, in order to promote quarter-end sales, Musk sent an email to all employees, asking them to demonstrate to customers how to use the "FSD system" before completing the delivery. "I knew it would lengthen the buying and delivery process, but it was something that every employee had to do. Experts estimate that Tesla's deliveries in the first quarter of this year were only 407,000 vehicles, down from 422875 in the same period last year.
Is a driverless taxi really here this time?
Many experts are not optimistic about Tesla's decision to release a driverless taxi. First of all, even if Tesla can release a driverless taxi on August 8 this year, it does not mean that it can be quickly and mass-produced in the market. Tesla's electric pickup product, the Cybertruck, for example, debuted as a revolutionary product in November 2019 with a completely different style from other pickup trucks on the market, inspired by the 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner, but it wasn't until November 2023 that the Cybertruck went into mass production. Another electric semi-truck, the Semi, was unveiled back in 2017 and deliveries did not begin until December 2022. To date, Semi's production and sales are still very small. Philip Koopman, a professor of autonomous vehicle safety at Carnegie Mellon University, said: "Projects that were thought to take only two or three years have turned out to take 10, 20 or even longer." "Tesla has also found this. ”
Reuters noted that other companies are also not going well in developing self-driving cars. On April 3, local time, Ghost Autonomy, an autonomous driving company invested by OpenAI, collapsed. "The path to long-term profitability is uncertain, given the current financing environment and the long-term investments required for in-house development and commercialization," the company said in a statement. In fact, Ghost Autonomy has invested $220 million in autonomous driving over the course of its seven years of existence, and it has ended up being a "bamboo basket". In an interview with Forbes magazine, CEO John Hayes reluctantly revealed that Ghost Autonomy could not finance the level of engineering intensity needed to bring the product to the consumer car market.
Another example is Apple's "Titan Project". On February 28 of this year, Apple terminated its plans to build a car and instead went all-in on generative AI. Faced with complex technical challenges, pressure from competitors, uncertainty in market demand, and rising borrowing costs, Apple will not be able to reverse its inevitable failure in the field of electric vehicles, despite spending more than $10 billion.
In addition, according to a Reuters report, analysts believe that there will inevitably be a lot of interest in driverless taxis due to the complexity of the technology involved. Musk chose to equip self-driving cars with radar and cameras instead of lidar, which Koopman believes is like "tying a person's hands behind their back." He added that any company developing a self-driving car needs to test it for one to two years until it performs flawlessly before it can be put to market, "and the industry is far from that at the moment."
Tesla's ADAS system has long been regulated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). On June 15, 2022, NHTSA released a report showing that since July 2021, there have been a total of 392 car accidents related to driver assistance systems in the United States, and Tesla accounts for nearly 70%. Musk then responded that "the accident is not the company's fault" and "our car system is very safe", but the outside world still raises questions and concerns about the safety of Tesla cars. NHTSA found Tesla's Autopilot system flawed and demanded that Tesla provide safety documentation or face a $220 million fine. Although Tesla disagrees with NHTSA's analysis, it voluntarily recalled more than 2 million electric vehicles in January this year. Experts who have tested Tesla's ADAS system told CNN: "Using this system may require becoming more vigilant. ”
News and picture sources: CNN, CNBC, the Wired, Reuters, some pictures from the Internet
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