I realize these posts are very niche. Most of you don’t care about Tesla or robotaxis. However, writing is how I get my thoughts in order. Any maybe there are a couple of other nerds who will enjoy hearing about this.
Look around, look around at how lucky we are,
– Hamilton
To be alive right now,
Look around, look around.
Before I get into this post, did you see what SpaceX did yesterday? During test 5 of Starship, SpaceX caught the booster at the point of launch with massive, mechanical arms:
And now back to the regularly scheduled post.
Robotaxis!
On 10/10/2024, Tesla laid out its plans for robotaxis at Warner Brothers Studios in California.
A robotaxi is a driverless vehicle. Tesla is planning a robotaxi service much like Uber but sans drivers.
I was fortunate enough to get an invite. Since Tesla is my biggest stock holding and Elon has bet the company on autonomous vehicles, I figured I ought to go. I was supposed to fly home from Cancun the day before (shout out to BPCon!), so I changed my flight to Los Angeles.
10/10/2024: The Event!
The event was held at night, so I had the day to myself. I took the time to walk up to the Hollywood sign. Seeing the sign up close was something I have wanted to do since I was a kid. Check another item off of the bucket list:
At about 5pm, I headed over to Warner Brothers. There was already a lot of people there, even though the event wasn’t going to start until 7pm.
Tesla did a great job staging the event in the Warner Brothers exterior sets. There were neat little touches everywhere which I’m guessing most didn’t notice (how much stuff did I miss?). For example, all of the storefronts had new names:
And then there was the lighting, drone shows, and fancy food:
Nice job Tesla team.
The Robotaxi Plan
Shortly before 8, the big show started. Elon Musk emerged from a building at the other end of the complex, got in the Cybercab (first time the world saw it), and was driven to the stage.
The main points of the presentation:
- Tesla will a launch a driverless robotaxi service in parts of California and Texas starting in 2025. This service will use currently available Tesla vehicles like the Model Y.
- Tesla will launch the Cybercab in two to three years. Members of the public will be able to purchase them and it will cost under $30,000.
- Tesla will also launch a van. The van looks like the love child of a toaster and streamliner train:
My Thoughts
Negatives
- Nothing I have seen from my own FSD experiences convinces me that it’s ready for robotaxi service. It is much better than when I bought the car one year ago, but it still has a long way to go. It still occasionally makes very basic errors.
- Two to three years for the Cybercab is a long way off. How many cities will Waymo be in by then?
- I was disappointed to not hear any updates on the FSD software itself. The software is key to everything and Tesla never says much about it.
Positives
- The Cybercab design makes a lot of sense. Some complained that it only seats two, but most Uber rides are one person. If you need to take your family somewhere, you can just order additional cars. Relying on a service like this, even with a family, will be far cheaper than owning a car. Musk stated that a service would cost about $.20 per mile.
- FSD users in other parts of the United States, mostly California, seem to have better experiences with the software than I do. Clearly Tesla has more data in California, so maybe it’s only a matter of time before Tesla solves my area? I record all issues in a spreadsheet and they are slowly going away as new versions of the software are released.
- If you can see through the bullshit, Elon usually accomplishes what he says he’s going to accomplish. He’s rarely on time, but perhaps he’ll eventually get robotaxis done.
- The employees who work for Tesla are incredibly enthusiastic and passionate. The energy at the robotaxi event was crazy. Whatever Tesla is doing with their culture, it’s working.
- While at the event, I heard an employee talking very enthusiastically about the next version of the FSD software (v13). I’ll believe it when I experience it, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
My big takeaway: After pondering the event for a while, the big question I have is this:
Why did Tesla have this event now?
The Cybercab is at least two years off. I don’t think Tesla has even started the process of getting FSD certified for use in California or Texas. Publicly FSD versions can’t even reverse yet and struggle to identify certain types of signs (My Y couldn’t care less about No Turn On Red).
Why wouldn’t Tesla announce this when it was closer to actually being able to launch a robotaxi service? The only thing I can guess is that they scheduled the event a long time ago and thought that they’d be further along by now.
Tesla Stock
I follow all things Tesla because I own the stock and Musk has bet the company on FSD. He stated that you should ‘sell your shares if you don’t believe in Tesla’s autonomous driving future.’ Tesla may figure out autonomous driving, but I’m not convinced. I don’t think Tesla’s stock price should include much of a premium for a robotaxi network today.
Counterpoint: Tesla has a lot of other business lines that are doing well including stationary storage and the Supercharger network. Tesla deserves to be valued more than a traditional auto company.
The Future
I hope that Tesla or Waymo figures out how to deploy robotaxis easily, cheaply, and thoroughly. I hope that it happens this decade. This technology is very disruptive, in a good way.
- Human operated cars are dangerous: 40,000 humans die in the United States every year in auto accidents. 94% of these accidents are caused by human error. Robotaxis would save many lives.
- Cars are expensive: We spend a lot of money to purchase a car. Then we spend more money to insure, maintain, and fuel them. Using a robotaxi would be significantly cheaper.
- Robotaxis would serve those who can’t drive. Consider how a robotaxi network would help the blind and the old.
Take A Step Back And Look Around
Look around, look around at how lucky we are,
– Hamilton
To be alive right now,
Look around, look around.
If you don’t pay attention to the news and just look around, life is pretty great. Humans continue to innovate and that’s benefitting us all. Calvin Coolidge’s son got a blister on his foot and died of an infection a short time later. The average person today lives better than kings did 100 years ago. The world is amazing and full of wonder. I’m so happy to get to be a part of it.
Life is good.
More 1500 Days!!!
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Honest questions:
1. Why would a consumer buy a taxi? I’ve yet to see this written about. Business opportunity? It seems like if this were really so great Elon would just own them all and profit from it, no?
2. Is your enthusiasm for Tesla waning at all due to Elons embrace of conspiracy theories and far right Trumpy bullshit?
Yeah, you’d buy them to start your own rideshare business. Sure Tesla would arrange it so they would get a healthy cut. But your question is a good one. I’m just guessing here, but perhaps Tesla only cares about larger markets. For example, it wouldn’t be worth their time to setup a network in Longmont (population of 100,000) where the economies of scale don’t work so well. With the cars, you have to have a facility to charge and clean them.
Elon was my nerd hero. I loved PayPal. Tesla and SpaceX are amazing companies. But no one wants to hear a CEO get hyper political. You’re just gonna piss off the other side. So yeah, I wish he’d just focus on the business.
Makes sense on the smaller locales. I just wonder what insurance is gonna cost for these things and if that makes sense at a small scale. The flexibility of robo taxis is interesting though, if it worked I would love to get rid of my car and use these to fill in places I wouldn’t or couldn’t bike.
Insurance is the big question. If Tesla is responsible for the driving, I believe that they should also be responsible for most of the insurance.
I feel Elon is a ceo for new companies, not existing established companies.
While he’s a political CEO and that’s not helpful, there comes a point in someone’s life where you have to be able to freely express your opinion. At how many billions do you say I want to do what I want to do? I runs business and I get it. I never really tell the public my actual opinion for fear of ticking off 49 -99% of the population
The thing that I don’t like is he claims the mission of Tesla is to get the world off of fossil fuels. By becoming political, he’s disrupting his own mission by turning off customers.
Typo: “He stated that you should you should ‘sell your shares”
Thanks!
I read your blog for FI content, but the Tesla articles are really interesting. The one report I read on the robotaxi launch was pretty negative, nice (and interesting) to read a balanced analysis. I could actually see me buying a few robotaxis in a medium sized town that’s big enough to get fares but small enough to be missed by the big companies.
Yep, I would do the same if I had a place to park them. Heck, it would be nice to just have one to use as a personal vehicle.
I still want electric cars, autonomous vehicles and reusable rockets to succeed, but I’m no longer rooting for Elon Musk to do it. His embrace of Trumpism, conspiracy theories and, most recently, straight-up Holocaust denial has wiped out any esteem I ever had for him.
Even leaving politics aside and sticking strictly to business, he’s not a trustworthy person for investors to depend upon. He’s been promising full self-driving for years, blown past multiple self-imposed deadlines, and doesn’t seem likely to deliver any time soon. People are getting tired of his vaporware, and the markets agree: Tesla stock went down, not up, after the robotaxi event. (It later came out that the so-called robots at the event were being remotely controlled by human beings – just more smoke and mirrors.)
Sadly true.
The counterpoint I’d offer to your second point:
Fun read! Sounded like an amazing experience 🙂
I appreciate your analysis on this, but based on your previous posts, you might have expected I’d chime in. A few thoughts:
– Yes 40,000 people die on the roads every year and that is 40,000 too many. However, the 94% based on human error is outdated thinking…it is human “error” responding to a society and roads that communicate that they can drive too fast, don’t have to stop for people crossing the street, can text and drive, etc. Better infrastructure and and some safety culture would address those “errors’. Really good, predictable, consistent, resilient, and communicative AI would help too.
– Two seats for a car that big can’t have much benefit over four. I have three kids…we’d have to wait for three to arrive and one kid would ride alone. However, a cybertaxi as part of a larger fleet makes sense if we could call an “XL version”.
– There are massive regulatory barriers to selling a car with no steering wheel included limited experimental approvals that Tesla hasn’t started (only one company has). Their gameplan appears to be Trump wins and appoint Musk deregulation czar so they can sell them.
– Musk continues to imply or outright state that private citizens will be running their own robotaxi side gig. However, ask an Uber driver how often they have to clean, then assume much worse behavior. Will the car know it is dirty so it swings by your office so you can come out for a quick wipe down? What if serving bar break leads to any number of bodily fluids left behind? There will have to the equivalent of AirBnB cleaning services, but that cuts into your bottom line and, more significantly, means even more unproductive, wasteful, congestion-causing miles an empty car is driving around. If this was a business model, Tesla would launch their own and not sell to competitors.
I appreciate your thoughts. Some comments:
The 40,000 number: Dunno if you’re right, but fixing that stuff is really hard. I was just in Germany and they don’t pull any of the crap we pull here. No one is looking at their phones and everyone drives well. It shows up in the numbers too. The US will never be like that though and it’s probably getting worse. Like you said, culture. But back to autonomous cars: Most of the situations you mentioned wouldn’t happen with an autonomous car. People will eventually die in a Waymo, but I’d bet that the overwhelming majority of the deaths will be caused by other drivers.
Two seats: Most rideshares are 1 person. However, I also acknowledge that Tesla wants to transform transportation to a service. The average family size in the states is just over 3 people. Calling two robot cars for a drive is still going to be a lot cheaper than car ownership for most. Also, Tesla has stated that other models will be able to participate in the network.
No steering wheel: So does Waymo have an easier path because even though there isn’t a driver, there is a steering wheel in the car?
Will the car know it is dirty so it swings by your office so you can come out for a quick wipe down? I was thinking of this too. I’d bet the car has an interior camera just like current Teslas. I’d also bet that Tesla will use it to alert a fleet manager of issues.
But I think most of this isn’t relevant unless Tesla can actually make FSD much better than it is now. At least here in Longmont Colorado, it’s not close to robotaxi ready and I remain skeptical. Musk will say things like, “The next version is going to have 3x less interventions!” And then it’s a tiny improvement. Show me a version with 100x less interventions than right now and we’ll be cooking with electrons!
Fixing that stuff is really hard (its my day job)! Most streets need to be retrofit to self-enforce a lower speed. but we probably have to redo at least our signing and striping to accommodate AVs, at least those like Tesla that are camera based. Enforcement/education/societal pressure/driver regulation need to change culture as well. AVs have the potential to save lives, but have new and different failure modes, especially when interacting with people and manual cars. For instance, I haven’t heard anyone solve the crossing issue (if people know AVs will stop for them, they will cross anywhere anytime, delaying cars so we just accept that that is what a city should be or city sidewalks become fenced in tunnels or other extreme measures like facial recognition camera enforcement).
Solving self driving absolutely is the #1 barrier, but regulation and “disrupting” the insurance and legal structure will be the next ones. The regulations I was referring to were for selling experimental vehicles, not operating AVs. Waymo isn’t making and selling vehicles, with or without steering wheels. Insurance, liability, and state-level regulation hasn’t seriously been tried to be solved either, which will also take the promised two years if not longer. It may take a Waymo killing someone and the case going to the Supreme Court to settle it, for instance. Who is going to assume liability in the meantime? Let’s not forget than an Uber AV has already killed someone and it was mostly pinned on the “safety driver”, a scapegoat that is going away.
The operations side can be solved, I just think it is interesting that few seem to be thinking about the logistics and glibly saying they will loan out their cars while at work. And I don’t think anyone is going to call multiple cabs, but there can be a varied fleet. My Utopia is like yours where cars mostly aren’t necessary or owned but are used as an variable transit fleet when needed (two seater for date night, box truck for moving day, shared bus for the commute). I realize that the first cab model concepts don’t have to show that whole range. Well, let’s not pretend this is the first. The bus model has been in operation for years on college campuses and even in rural Iowa.
At this point, it is still hard to tell what is an easy solution, a service business opportunity, and a fundamental fatal flaw.
I took several Waymo rides on a trip to Phoenix this fall. It was a great experience. Much cheaper and less hassle than renting a car. Also, after reading the book Why We Sleep, I am much more concerned about sleep deprived human drivers.
Nice.
After seeing the dumb things some humans do while driving, I’m VERY MUCH looking forward to robot cars replacing them.
I didn’t realize you were attending this event in-person. What a spectacle that must have been! Did any of the robots serve you drinks?
Speaking of drinks, if and when driverless cars become the norm, DUI rates should fall essentially to zero, at least for those who opt in to being a passenger in self-driving vehicles. Kinda cool to think that your own vehicle can also be your designated driver.
Cheers!
Leif
It was a total spectacle! I’m an EV fanboy, but folks at these events take it to the next level.
A friend who was a criminal defense lawyer joking lamented that most of his business (drunk drivers) will be eliminated by self-driving cars. Maybe he can sue big tech instead when robots attack or the cars screw up?!?? 🙂
I did not interact with a robot. I would have had to wait for 45 minutes. No thanks. I should have gotten a robot to hold my place in line.