While the initial launch date for Tesla’s self-driving cab Robotaxi has been pushed, Tesla chief Elon Musk remains optimistic. Tesla owners will be able to transform their vehicles into Robotaxis, allowing their cars to generate income, much like an “Airbnb on wheels.”
Robotaxi Vision
The Robotaxi service aims to make Tesla drivers add their vehicles into the cab fleet, a little different from other autonomous cab providers such as Waymo or Baidu.
“We’ll have a fleet that’s on the order of 7 million that are capable of autonomy. In the years to come it will be over 10 million and 20 million. This is immense,” said Tesla chief Elon Musk. “The car is able to operate 24/7 unlike the human drivers,” he said.
However, Tesla’s concept of Robotaxi has been recently questioned by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, in a recent interview. “It’s not clear to me that the average person,Tesla owner, or owner of any other car is going to want to have that car be ridden in by a complete stranger,” he said.
Shared Revenue
Similar to your third-party cab provider, such as Uber, Tesla is also looking to have a shared revenue format with the Robotaxi owners. Musk also highlighted how Robotaxi will give the luxury to the users to choose the hours and schedule the hours of operation accordingly, thereby giving Robotaxi owners the choice to use it as both a personal and a commercial vehicle.
Interestingly, Khosrowshahi even questioned the supply angle for this particular format of ride. “It just so happens that probably the times at which you’re going to want your Tesla are probably going to be the same times that ridership is going to be at a peak.” Thereby, hinting at how the demand and supply will not be met.
Furthermore, he is also sceptical about the whole autonomous feature in vehicles. “We’re seeing that when one of our customers is offered an autonomous ride, about half the time they say, yeah that would be really cool, and half the time they say, no thank you, I’d rather have a human I think that’s going to improve over a period of time,” he said.
Even then, the Uber CEO has not denied a likely partnership with Tesla in the future. “Hopefully, Tesla will be one of those partners. You never know.”
With numerous autonomous vehicles on the market, the key distinction lies in the different approaches each company has taken toward autonomous capabilities.
LiDAR vs Vision
Tesla uses computer vision (Tesla Vision) rather than the conventional LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) tech for autonomous vehicles.
Musk has always been vocal about using vision-only methods for autonomous capabilities as opposed to Waymo and other self-driving cars that heavily rely on LiDAR.
Previously, Musk had even called out LiDAR as a “fool’s errand” and that anyone relying on it is “doomed.” He even referred to Waymo’s robotaxi services as limited and fragile, and claims Tesla’s systems to work anywhere in the world, not limited by geography.
The cost of LiDAR has been a major deciding factor for adopting sensors in autonomous vehicles. Musk considers LiDAR to be expensive sensors that are unnecessary. He believes that cameras, which Tesla banks on, will help them navigate through adverse weather conditions.
Kilian Weinberger, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, had earlier said that cameras are dirt cheap compared to lidar. “By doing this they can put this technology into all the cars they’re selling. If they sell 500,000 cars, all of these cars are driving around collecting data for them,” he said.
While Tesla is heavily backing vision tech for AV, LiDAR is not completely out of the picture. Recently, Tesla purchased over $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar. The company revealed that Tesla was its largest LiDAR customer in Q1.
“At some point Tesla will pivot and adopt LiDAR. I think it is not an if question, but rather when,” a user speculated on Reddit.
Self-Driving Cars on the Rise
Driverless car services are witnessing a huge growth. Google’s parent Alphabet, recently announced an investment of $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary Waymo. Currently, they operate in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles and they will soon test them on the freeways of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was reported that Waymo is currently delivering 50,000 paid rides per week.
Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, is also developing autonomous vehicles and is operational in certain cities in the US.
Baidu’s autonomous fleet which is already running 6000 driverless rides per day in Wuhan (China) adopts a mix of technologies. As of April 2024, the cumulative test mileage of Apollo L4 has exceeded 100 million kilometres.
“I think we are all at L4 today; and with the government regulation, it’s not possible to do L5. Another thing is that, I think, all of us providing this technology haven’t been tested in all the scenarios. We wouldn’t have this confidence to claim that we have the L5 capability,” said Helen K. Pan, general manager and board of directors for Baidu Apollo, California, in an earlier interaction with AIM.
While Waymo and Baidu are at L4 level of autonomous capability, Tesla is still between L2 and L3.
The Robotaxi unveiling event is currently planned for October 10. Musk is also positive of expanding Tesla’s self-driving technology to a wide market in the U.S. and internationally.
