Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s Cybercab robotaxi, promising it will cost less than $30,000, and announced plans to bring autonomous driving to its Model 3 and Model Y cars in California and Texas next year.
At the highly anticipated We, Robot event held at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, the billionaire arrived in the Cybercab in his signature black leather jacket, accompanied by a man dressed in a space suit. Human-like robots mingled with the crowd, dancing and serving drinks to those gathered for the party.
In the lead-up to the announcement, Analysts were skeptical. that Tesla would deliver on its promise, as fully autonomous vehicles had been on the cards for nine years and robotaxis for five years.
Musk said there were 20 more Cybercabs at the event, in addition to the one that had arrived, and 50 fully autonomous vehicles for attendees to test out in the 20 acres of space Tesla had secured for the event.
The Cybercab will have no steering wheel or pedals, Musk said, and will have inductive charging instead of a plug.
He added that Tesla had “overspecified” the computer in the vehicles into what it called an Amazon Web Services style of computing, where it can be distributed across the car network.
Musk said Tesla expected the cost of the Cybercab to be less than $30,000 (£22,980, A$44,500).
He said Cybercab would be in production “in 2026,” then paused and added “before 2027.”
“I tend to be a little optimistic about timelines,” he said.
The future Musk envisions with autonomous vehicles is one in which parking lots can be replaced by parks, and people can fall asleep or watch a movie in a “small, comfortable lounge” while they are transported to their destination.
He said self-driving cars could be used as Uber-like taxis when not in use by the owner, and that people could create fleets of vehicles to rival ride-sharing companies in what he described as a “shepherd with a flock of cars.” . .
“It’s going to be a glorious future.”
Before that, Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y vehicles will transition from supervised autonomous driving to unsupervised autonomous driving, starting in California and Texas next year, and in other parts of the US and the rest of the world depending. of regulatory approval. He says the S and X models will also have autonomous driving, but he didn’t set a time frame.
“With autonomy, you get your time back. “It will save lives, many lives, and prevent injuries,” he said.
He said cars would be safer than humans driving, given that Tesla has collected driving data from millions of vehicles.
“With that amount of training data, it’s obviously going to be a lot better than a human being can be because you can’t live a million lives,” he said. “He doesn’t get tired and he doesn’t text. “It will be 10, 20, 30 times safer than a human.”
It also announced an autonomous van called Robovan that can carry up to 20 people and goods, but did not announce the price or when it would go into production.
The billionaire stated that the company had “made a lot of progress” with Optimus, the humanoid robot that Tesla has developed. Musk introduced the robots into the event hall and told attendees they would “walk among you” and serve drinks.
“Please be kind to the Optimus robots,” he said.
At the end of the event, a group of robots stood on a neon-lit stage dancing to Daft Punk’s Robot Rock. He predicted that “at scale” the Optimus robot would cost up to $30,000.
The display of Tesla’s advances in autonomous driving comes as the automaker is facing a class action lawsuit in the United States from Tesla owners who had been promised full autonomous driving that had not yet been delivered.
In February of last year, Tesla was pressured to withdraw fully autonomous vehicles from the market by U.S. safety regulators because the system allows speeding and other traffic violations, and Tesla fixed the problem with a software update.
In April of this yearRegulators also announced an investigation into full autonomous driving and Autopilot systems and whether the company was doing enough to make sure human drivers were paying attention, after 20 crashes involving Autopilot were reported following the recall. former.