Tesla Expected to Unveil a Robotaxi Tonight: 5 Things to Know

An idealistic billionaire takes the stage (perhaps, with a humanoid robot at his side?) to unveil a futuristic technology he promises will change the world — a vision that's alternately celebrated, mocked, and feared.

It's a scene straight out of Hollywood. And that's exactly where it's going to happen tonight — at a Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California.

Tesla is calling the event “We, the Robots.” At 7 p.m. Pacific time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected to unveil the company's design for a dedicated robotaxi, a Tesla designed solely to ferry passengers without a driver — a feat the company's semi-autonomous software has yet to demonstrate. .

“The future will be live streaming,” posted on Company X, the social media platform that owns Mask.

Here are 5 things to know about Tesla's big bet on autonomous driving

Musk says robotaxis are key to Tesla's future profitability

Tesla makes money selling electric vehicles — indeed, the 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.

In addition to selling cars, Tesla sells an expensive software package called “Full Self Driving (Supervised)”. It can autonomously guide a Tesla down wide streets and navigate stoplights, stop signs and pedestrians without human input … most of the time. But it periodically requires a human to take over, meaning it is not truly autonomous.

Musk has always maintained that the software will be in high demand when it becomes fully autonomous — as it would allow people to make money by lending out their personal vehicles, like a driverless Uber or Lyft.

“The cost of an all-electric autonomous fleet is usually enormous — truly mind-boggling.” He told investors in 2021. “It would be one of the most valuable things ever done in the history of civilization.”

A custom-built vehicle only A relatively new twist on Musk's vision for the Robotaxi ride. Hope to hear more about it on Thursday.

He promised they were coming next year – for years

Musk has become notorious for his overly enthusiastic estimates of how soon Tesla Robotaxis will arrive. He's even making fun of himself every time he makes a mistake.

• Musk in 2019: “Definitely next year we'll have over a million robotaxis on the road.”
• Musk in 2020: “I think we'll see robotaxis in operation … next year. Not in all markets, but in some markets.”
• In 2021: “I'm very confident that the car will drive itself this year with greater reliability than a human.”
• In 2022: I'd be shocked if we didn't achieve fully self-driving—safer than humans—this year.”
• 2023: “Now, I know I'm the boy who cried [Full-Self-Driving]But man, I think — I think by the end of this year we'll be better than man.”
• And this summer: “Of course, my predictions on this have been overly optimistic in the past. … Next year seems highly probable to me.

The problem is when Tesla's software can drive the car without human help a lot At this point, it is still not reliable enough for unaided driving all of time

Meanwhile, companies like Alphabet's Waymo and GM's Cruise have already sent driverless taxis on the road — though Cruise has put human “safety drivers” behind the wheel. Crashed last year. There are frequent calls to the system Help from a distance If a car gets stuck. But it's a far cry from needing constant supervision: According to data provided to the state of California, Waymo drove nearly 1.2 million fully driverless miles last year with a total of 14 “discontinuities,” or manual control of the software.

Even for those companies, robotoxy is still not profitable. Auto market research giant JD Power recently surveyed people who have ridden in robotaxis and found that while passengers generally like the experience, they don't find taxis practical. Until they become cheaper and cover more ground, the pollsters concluded, “the service will remain a novel mode of transportation.”

Tesla's approach to autonomy is unusual — and controversial

So if robotoxis already exists, why doesn't Tesla have the technology yet? There's a big difference between how other companies — like Waymo, Cruise, driverless trucking company Aurora and a number of startups — approach autonomy and how Tesla is trying to do it.

Musk decided to build a system based only on relatively cheap cameras, with no other input; Other companies use radar and other expensive high-tech sensors. Musk also embraces “end-to-end learning,” where artificial intelligence “learns” how to drive from raw data; Other companies add human-designed rules and fences to their AI systems.

Canaccord Genuity Group analyst George Gianarikas notes that Musk's approach requires billions of dollars in upfront investment in AI, but much cheaper hardware in vehicles. It's a combination that's expensive now, but will pay off when millions of Robotoxis are on the road.

Kasturi is adamant that Tesla's method is superior. “Our entire street network is designed for biological neural nets” — that is, human brains — “and eyes, so naturally cameras and digital neural nets are the solution,” Musk told investors earlier this year. Tesla has a lot of driving data from its vehicles on the road today.

Other organizations say this approach is not only wrong but dangerous. Aurora took the unusual step of emailing reporters ahead of Tesla's event this week to share bullet points about exactly what they object to. Those include concerns about making sure a system learns good driving behavior — not bad, like running stop signs — and systems of checks and balances.

“Tesla uses a 'train and pray' approach, where you solve a problem by throwing more data into the system,” Aurora CPO Sterling Anderson. said In a webcast, Aurora's email is quoted. “We find that problematic in a safety-critical industry where you need confidence and proof that you've got it right.”

Anderson worked at Tesla, where he helped launch Tesla's Autopilot software, its first partial-automation system, Aurora email notes. Waymo Just snagged A former executive of the Tesla team.

A wild card: what will the regulators think?

The U.S. still has no federal laws governing self-driving, so a patchwork of state and city regulators set the boundaries of what companies can and can't do.

Musk has always acknowledged that achieving fully self-driving isn't just a matter of technological innovation; If regulators aren't sure a robotaxi fleet is safe, it's not going anywhere.

This has implications for the physical design of vehicles. Cruise recently abandoned plans for a futuristic robotaxi vehicle without a steering wheel, returning to a more conventional design with a human. can operates, primarily to reduce the risk of evading regulators.

And government concerns can also affect software. Gianarikas said regulators who dig into the coding of a system built with “end-to-end” deep learning may not like what they find.

“You can imagine a scenario where [regulators] There's just this moment of, 'What? Do you have … any hard coded software rules? He said “'How do you control it?'”

Still, Gianarikas notes that while there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi fleet, Elon Musk has a track record of ultimately proving the skeptics wrong.

Disclosures may include other types of robots

The name of the event — “We, Robot” — is a nod to a collection of classic Isaac Asimov short stories exploring the moral and psychological implications of creating increasingly human-like robots. It's also the title of a very vaguely related Will Smith action movie.

This hints at the possibility that, in addition to a robotaxi, the release could feature Optimus, the humanoid robot Tesla is developing as an autonomous worker capable of performing repetitive tasks.

“I think the long-term value of Optimus will be greater than anything that includes Tesla,” Musk told investors this summer. “A humanoid robot that can do pretty much anything you ask. … I think everyone in the world would want one.”

Optimus, a black and white robot with a featureless face of smooth black glass, can walk — in a limp, gliding kind of way. Tesla has Shared video of Sort objectsstanding on one leg and the dance.

Dan Ives, an analyst and longtime Tesla bull, will be in attendance Thursday night. He's less interested in Android and more in whether Musk can demonstrate a fully autonomous vehicle that actually works.

“It needs to be a jaw-dropper kind of event,” he said — hype and promises won't cut it.

“It cost billions of dollars,” Ives said. “It can't just be, 'Get the popcorn out.'