Recent reports from the global media agency Reuters suggest that Tesla has scrapped work on the platform that would underpin the much-hyped ‘affordable’ Tesla Model 2 in favor of pursuing a Robotaxi project.
The news agency says internal company reports and interviews with sources familiar with the matter state that “Elon’s directive is to go all-in on Robotaxi,” indicating that the platform and its innovative ‘Unboxed’ production methods were previously touted for smaller, more affordable and German-built models were diverted to autonomous driving vehicles.
Integral to the affordability of Tesla’s Chinese EV-competing model was this new manufacturing process, which Tesla unveiled last year and which it said would involve fewer individual jobs on the production line.
By producing large sub-assemblies of the same car and then putting them all together at the same time, Tesla said it could reduce the production costs of electric cars by as much. 50%.
However, Musk was relatively quick to shut down Reuters reports surrounding the Model 2, taking to his favorite platform canceled car plans. .
But on the same day, Musk then posted “Tesla Robotaxi unveils on 8/8,” hinting that we’ll see the long-teased autonomous driving vehicle in August of this year.
This fits with Musk’s long-standing narrative that Tesla owners will one day be able to generate revenue from their vehicles, even going so far as to tease the silhouette of his Robotaxi at the company’s third Master Plan event last year.
Musk wrote in a post on the Tesla website in 2016: “You can also add your car to the Tesla shared fleet by simply tapping a button in the Tesla phone app, and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, reducing costs significantly be compensated. Sometimes this can exceed the monthly loan or lease costs.”
Everything in autonomous mode
Musk’s vision that privately owned Teslas will one day generate revenue for their respective owners rests solely on the promise that Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technology will reach a point where humans are no longer needed as part of the process.
But the systems have come under fire in recent years lawsuits There are rumors in the US that Autopilot had caused wrongful deaths Consumer Reports suggested that previous versions of the system were easily exploitable and distracting.
Tesla then recalled two million vehicles via an OTA update to prevent drivers from abusing the Autopilot feature. This was in response to a rather damning report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.NHTSA) who claimed that “certain driving maneuvers could potentially violate local traffic laws or customs”.
I have personally witnessed an attempt by some of the world’s largest automakers to solve the riddle of fully autonomous driving over the years with several breakthroughs, including that of Nissan’s Maarten Sierhuis, an ex-NASA alumni who employs have been taken to advance technology.
But even Nissan’s response in 2017 was to resort to a human-operated call center, which it called Seamless Autonomous Mobility (or SAM for short), that could remotely take over driving duties whenever a fully autonomous vehicle got stuck .
Fast forward to 2024 and it feels like we haven’t moved the fully autonomous driving story much further, despite Musk’s insistence.
Musk’s Robotaxi will inevitably prove to be a stroke of technological genius, but it will also likely be many, many years away from reality.