Elon Musk has just announced on X that Tesla will hold a Robotaxi unveil event on August 8th, 2024.
For Tesla’s robotaxi (no steering wheel and pedals) to be unveiled and ultimately head to production, the company needs to have the software locked away.
We have seen good progress with Version 12 of FSD, but there are still items that need to be addressed and it’s not clear that we know exactly what’s left on the to-do list and how long those items will take to resolve.
We know from the Walter Isaacson’s biography that Musk had wanted to build a robotaxi vehicle without a steering wheel and pedals but was persuaded by the team to also make a variant with traditional controls as a hedge in case the software wasn’t ready.
I expect the robotaxi unveil will still include both variants of the vehicle, with the wheel and pedals option to be available for sale to consumers. How close they can get to the rumoured US$25,000 price tag remains to be seen, with the cars expected to be late 2025/early 2026 before they hit the road.
We know Tesla plans to develop and make the first models of the robotaxi at Gigafactory Texas, while the long-term scale production is planned for the future Mexico plant.
As it stands today, FSD (Supervised) is performing well, with many Tesla owners in North America and Canada reporting zero intervention drives from point A to point B. As promising as this is for Tesla’s new end-to-end approach in V12, there’s still work required, the question is, can those outstanding issues be resolved before the first robotaxi rolls off the production line?
Between now and the end of 2025, there are 634 days. If you ramp the robotaxi production and the software isn’t ready, this risks billions of dollars of investment. In the best case, the planets align and Tesla looks amazing, in the worst case, they end up with a parking lot full of cars that can’t be driven by humans and doesn’t have the software to drive itself.
If Tesla were to flip the switch today and have the cars drive themselves, it is likely that many wouldn’t make it back home, with pothole detection, accommodating for wildlife, road works and other edge cases still challenging.
The design of the robotaxi will be important from a customer perspective, it should be an inviting experience inside and easy to enter and exit the vehicle (like a Model Y). The design of the vehicle will be even more important if Tesla does offer the variant for sale to consumers and in that instance, the reference to this vehicle being ‘utilitarian’ is somewhat concerning.
The good news is, in just 4 months from now, we’ll know the design and history tells us the design unveil will fairly accurately represent the final product.
