Tesla Is Ready to Roll Out Its Robotaxis
On Thursday evening, at around 7 pm Pacific time, Tesla is slated to unveil the newest vehicle in its lineup: one that will be able to drive itself. A purpose-built Tesla robot taxi—a Cybercab, in the electric automaker’s parlance—is meant to establish the company as less a manufacturer of cars than a maker of pathbreaking robotics technology. “The way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet,” CEO Elon Musk told Tesla investors in April.
As Musk takes the stage tomorrow at the Warner Bros. Discovery movie studio in Burbank, California, and attempts to usher that substantial (and difficult) vision into reality, canny observers should keep watch for information about Tesla’s service that extends beyond the vehicle itself—the robot devil will likely be in the robot details. Ride-hailing services are logistically complex, governed by liability laws and state-by-state regulations. Sometimes, robot taxis are attacked by vandals. To run a robotaxi fleet, Tesla will have to work out all of those pieces.
The Tesla robotaxi has been a long time coming. Musk made his first promise about a self-driving, Uber-like service back in 2019, when he said that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. At the time, the idea was that the automaker would be able to effectively “flip a switch” to transform on-the-road Teslas into autonomous robots able to do their drivers’ bidding—including pick up fares!—during down times. This past April, Musk announced the official Cybercab reveal would take place in August, then he delayed it after saying the vehicle needed design tweaks.
