Achi news desk-
Elon Musk has long been associated with self-driving vehicles, claiming they will be one of Tesla’s most important products. Despite great promises, years have passed without cars that can, so far, drive themselves.
But Musk announced, on Friday afternoon, when companies tend to bury news, on X that Tesla would unveil its robotaxis on August 8.
His job was simple and contained no details. “Tesla Robotaxi unveiled on 8/8,” Tesla CEO (and X owner) posted.
Musk has said in the past that Tesla will make a car without controls for a human to use. He has also said in the past that Tesla’s Fully Self-Driving Capable cars will, through software updates, gradually get better and better at driving. At some point, the cars will be able to operate as fully autonomous taxis and could earn their owners money by giving taxi rides on their own, Musk has said repeatedly.
So far, the company has passed many of Musk’s predictions for when true self-driving would be possible.
Five years ago, in April 2019, Tesla said it expected to start operating robotaxis by 2020. The company predicted that the autonomous cars would last 11 years and drive 1 million miles, making the company and the operators of the car is US$30,000 in profit every year.
But Musk also acknowledged that his track record of predictions can be off — sometimes by a mile.
“The only criticism and it’s fair, sometimes I’m not on time. But I’m doing it and the Tesla team is doing it,” Musk said at the April 2019 event.
Currently, Full Self-driving capability with the new Tesla Model 3, for example, can be purchased for an additional US$12,000 added to the car’s roughly US$40,000 purchase price. It can also be purchased on a subscription basis for up to US$199 per month, depending on how the car was originally equipped.
In small gray type, Tesla’s online description states, “Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous,” meaning it is not is, in fact, fully able to drive today.
Musk has said that the system will one day make Tesla cars extremely valuable.
“You can think of every car that we sell or manufacture that has full autonomy capability as something that could be worth five times what it is today in the future,” he said in the company’s earnings call for the third quarter of last year.
Experts who have tested the system say that, at present, it is far from being able to drive on its own without human intervention.
Kelly Funkhouser, associate director of vehicle technology for Consumer Reports, tested the system recently and said she’s less concerned about its safety than she is about regular Tesla Autopilot, which is designed to provide more limited driving assistance mostly on highways. . Ironically, that’s because the Full Self-driving technology performs so poorly. Funkhouser described it as giving control of your car to a young teenage driver.
“You’re not likely to tune out and become complacent or over-reliant on it,” he says. “Actually, I’d say you could be more alert.”
A number of companies, including Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, as well as GM Cruise subsidiary, are working on autonomous ride-sharing services.
Cruise has stopped testing after one of his self-driving cars hit and dragged a pedestrian. An internal review found that company representatives failed to be fully open with regulators about the incident. The Department of Justice is investigating the company regarding the incident.
Waymo recently had to recall its own cars after two of its cars hit the same tow truck within minutes of each other.
