The designs look great. I’ll give them that. Franz von Holzhausen hasn’t lost his touch.
But for anyone who was expecting Tesla to settle the countless questions about how it will safely incorporate artificial intelligence into autonomous driving, or implement a robotaxi service that seems to be on the level of Uber or Lyft, or get past the scores of regulatory hurdles that a network of robotic taxis would face, the We, Robot event came up short.
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In case you didn’t stay up late for this one, I’ll direct you to the video broadcast of the event (do mind the 52-minute delay upfront in the form of a Windows Me screensaver backed by one of the more grating varieties of electronic music) or my colleague Mack Hogan’s liveblog recap from last night.
Suffice it to say, CEO Elon Musk, for the mere 20 minutes he was onstage at a Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California, did bring some surprises. We expected the Robotaxi, also known as the Cybercab, but we did not know how far its Cybertruck-inspired design might go. We really did not expect the Robovan, a seemingly 1930s Art Deco-inspired streamliner designed to move up to 20 people. And we also did not expect a move into inductive charging from Tesla—the Cybercab will, according to Musk, not have a charging port at all.
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It would be fascinating to know more about how that could work, what its charging time and speed could be, and how it could be incorporated into future Tesla models. Or what platform or platform these vehicles could use and where they’ll be made. Or exactly how their self-driving systems can be “10, 20, 30 times safer than a human driver” as Musk claims, without using LIDAR or other advanced sensors like the rest of the industry.
But we didn’t get into any of that. What we got instead was Musk narrating a video presentation followed by short, closed-course demo rides in an extremely controlled environment. This might feel impressive if you couldn’t hail a Waymo taxi in San Francisco right now that can do about 100 times more than that.
Put more bluntly, it would’ve been impressive in 2016, which is about how old all of Musk’s promises around autonomy are.
For an event that was supposed to be make or break for Tesla’s stock price, as Barron’s put it, or the day when the bill is finally due, to quote The Verge, it was all more than a little underwhelming. After all, Musk has been very clear that he is staking the company’s $1 trillion potential market cap on “solving” autonomy and self-driving cars. As slick as this showcase was tonight, there was little indication that Tesla is close to doing so.
I’m not the only one who thought as much.
“The event, frankly, was a bit of a letdown,” that same Barron’s author wrote this morning. “Tesla… talked about starting limited robotaxi service as early as 2025. But there wasn’t much technical safety detail or discussion for Tesla executives besides Elon Musk. Most of what Musk said has been said before.”
Edmunds‘ Head of Insights, Jessica Caldwell, said the event painted “an ideal future for transportation that promises to both free up our time and increase safety,” but agreed that Musk offered little in the way of a roadmap on how to get there.
“Making the leap from where we are today to full autonomy (particularly through unsupervised vehicles with zero steering or pedals) is so gargantuan, technology-wise, that it feels overly ambitious in such a short period of time,” Caldwell said. “Regulatory approval will be required along with major buy-in from the public in order for vehicles like the robotaxi to manifest prior to 2027 as part of the everyday consumer experience because public safety is a major question.”
Details, I suppose, to those in the crowd last night.
From what I could see watching from afar, the We, Robot event had a joyous feel to it—Optimus robots walking through the crowd and making drinks, Tesla’s biggest fans and supporters going for Cybercab rides and Musk himself promising a coming “age of abundance” where “anyone will be able to have any products and services they want.”
Yet that wildly optimistic tone stood in stark contrast to Musk himself as of late, who’s become the doomsday preacher of the digital age after acquiring the social media platform Twitter and transforming it into the dark fountain of misinformation and hate speech that is X. Just in the past few days alone, it’s not hard at all to find examples of Musk railing against immigrants and spreading dangerous lies amid some of the worst natural disasters the U.S. has ever seen. And that comes after more than a year of, among many other things, using that platform to make life miserable for queer and trans kids.
You may roll your eyes as you read the above and tell me to “stick to cars.” But at this point, Musk won’t do that, or can’t, so why should anyone else? With so few details about how Tesla aims to deliver this supposedly prosperous and utopian future, Earth has little to go on but faith in the man himself. And that man is not to be underestimated, both in terms of his own drive and his considerable resources. Everything he said last night, and recently makes me wonder who this “age of abundance” is supposed to be for—and who will be included in it.
(More than that, I wonder how a company ostensibly founded to battle climate change intends to deliver some forthcoming age of unlimited everything.)
But in the end, the We, Robot event was less about the future and more about funding it. If this event was “successful”—and reactions to it seem considerably more muted than any Tesla superfan must have wanted—it will keep the stock pumped up a little while longer, all while Musk can reassure us that the future is right around the corner, just a year or two away. Just as it’s always been.
Update 9:40 a.m.: Or maybe not.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
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