Tesla Drives: How Robotic Will It Be? Elon Musk, Humanoid Robots, and Self-Driving Cars

There was a long time coming theTeslarobotaxi. When he made his first promise about a self-driving service, Musk had said that he would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. The idea was that the automaker could turn on-the-road Teslas into self driving cars if they wanted to do so during down times. The official Cybercab reveal was delayed in August after Musk said the vehicle needed design changes.

An idiosyncratic billionaire takes to the stage (with, perhaps, a humanoid robot by his side?) to unveil a futuristic technology that he promises will transform the world — a vision alternately celebrated, mocked and feared.

Tesla makes money selling electric vehicles — in fact, its profit margins on its cars, which are consistently in the double digits, are enviable for an automaker. Musk wants to know the profit margins of the software industry.

Musk has maintained that the demand for the software will go up more than usual when self-driving cars are available, because people could make money off their personal vehicles by lending them out.

“The value of a fully electric autonomous fleet is generally gigantic — boggles the mind, really.” He told his investors in the year 2021. “That will be one of the most valuable things that’s ever done in the history of civilization.”

Still, Gianarikas notes that while there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about a Tesla robotaxi fleet, Elon Musk has a track record of eventually proving skeptics wrong.

GM’s Cruise put safety drivers back behind the steering wheel after a crash last year, but other companies have already sent self-guided taxis onto the streets. Someone is on call to assist if a car gets stuck. But that’s a far cry from needing constant oversight: According to data it supplied the state of California, Waymo drove nearly 1.2 million fully driverless miles last year with a total of 14 “disengagements,” or times the software required manual control.

Even for those companies, robotaxis aren’t profitable yet. The auto market research giant J.D. Power recently surveyed people who have ridden in robotaxis and found that while passengers generally liked the experience, they don’t find the taxis practical. Until they’re cheaper and cover more ground, the pollsters concluded, “the service will remain a novelty transportation method.”

Musk claims thatTesla’s approach is superior. The whole road network was designed for biological neural nets, which include human brains, and eyes, so cameras and digital neural nets are the solution, according to Musk. The amount of driving data from the vehicles that are on the road is huge.

Other companies say this approach is not just wrong but dangerous. Aurora began sharing their bullet points about what they object to in email to reporters weeks in advance of the event. Concerns about making sure the system learns good driving behaviors like not running stop signs and that there are systems of checks and balances were included.

Anderson used to work at Tesla, where he helped launch Tesla’s Autopilot software, its first partial-automation system, the Aurora email notes. There is also a former Tesla exec on the team.

How Do You Control It? A Comment on Tesla-Robotaxi Cyber Cab-Reveal Tomorrow (CNNRS30)

The United States does not have any federal law governing self-driving cars. A patchwork of state and city regulators set boundaries for what companies can and cannot do.

Musk has always said that achieving full self-driving is not just a matter of technological innovation, if regulators don’t believe it’s safe it isn’t going anywhere.

That has consequences for the design of vehicles. Cruise recently abandoned their plans to create a vehicle that had no steering wheel in favor of a conventional design that could be operated by humans, so that they wouldn’t run afoul of regulators.

And governmental concerns could also affect software. The regulators who dig into the coding of the system might not like what they find.

You can imagine a scenario where regulators just have this moment. You don’t have hard-coded software rules? He said so. “How do you control it?”

Source: Tesla is expected to unveil a robotaxi tonight: 5 things to know

We, Robot: From Isaac Asimov Short Story Series to a Humanoid Robot (An Action Movie About Will Smith)

The event’s name — “We, Robot” — is a nod to a classic Isaac Asimov short story collection exploring the ethical and psychological implications of building increasingly human-like robots. It is also the title of an action movie about Will Smith.

That indicates that the reveal may feature a humanoid robot, such as the one developed byTesla, capable of doing repetitive tasks.

An analyst and long-time bull of the company, Dan is going to be there. He is more interested in the performance of a fully self-sufficient vehicle than he is the performance of an artificially intelligent device.