Why is Tesla Don’t Have a Robot Axis Already? Why Does Musk Seem to Be Taking Over the World? An Analytical Analysis

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.

The event is called “We, Robot.” At 7 p.m. Pacific time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected to unveil the company’s design for a dedicated robotaxi, a Tesla designed exclusively to ferry passengers without a driver — a feat the company’s semi-autonomous software has not yet demonstrated it can do.

The profit margins on its cars are very high, which is good news for an automobile manufacturer. The software industry’s profit margins are something Musk wants to see more of.

So if robotaxis already exist, why doesn’t Tesla have this tech yet? There’s a big difference between how other companies — like Waymo, Cruise, the driverless trucking company Aurora and a host of startups — approach autonomy, and how Tesla is trying to do it.

The analyst notes that Musk would need billions of dollars of upfront investment in Artificial Intelligence, but less expensive hardware on vehicles. If there were millions of robotaxis on the road, that would make that combination pay off.

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

Despite the fact that there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical, Musk has a track record of proving skeptics wrong.

It appears to be lost on some people how much things have changed since 2016, when Musk first promised that Full Self-Driving was a mere “two years away.” Many people keep stuck in the outdated idea that self- driving cars are going to take over the world because it is an easy problem to solve.

Even for those companies, robotaxis aren’t profitable yet. People who have ridden in robotaxis generally enjoyed the experience, but they don’t find the taxis practical according to a recent survey by J.D. Power. Until they’re cheaper and cover more ground, the pollsters concluded, “the service will remain a novelty transportation method.”

Other companies use radar and high tech sensors as well as cheap cameras, but Musk decided to build a system only with cheap cameras. Musk embraced end- to-end learning where the artificial intelligence learns how to drive from raw data and other companies added human-designed rules.

This approach is not right according to other companies. Aurora took the unusual step of preemptively emailing reporters ahead of Tesla’s event this week to share bullet points about exactly what they object to. Those included concerns about making sure a system is learning good driving behaviors — not bad ones, like running stop signs — and that there are systems of checks and balances.

Anderson worked for the company where he helped launch the first partial automation system, the Aurora email states. Waymo just snagged a former Tesla exec for its team, too.

Robot axis: How do you decide what you can do if you don’t know how to drive? How does regulators control it?

The United States still has no federal laws governing self-driving, so a patchwork of state and city regulators set the boundaries of what companies can and cannot do.

Musk has acknowledged that achieving self-driving cars isn’t just about technology, but also about safety, and that it isn’t going anywhere if regulators don’t think it is safe.

The robotaxi is a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, lacking a steering wheel or pedals, meaning it will need approval from regulators before going into production. The design was futuristic, with doors that open upward like butterfly wings and a small cabin with only enough space for two passengers. There was no steering wheel or pedals in the car, according to Musk.

And governmental concerns could also affect software. Regulators might dislike what they find if they dig into the coding of a system built by deep learning.

It could be a situation where regulators just kind of have this moment. You do not have any hard-coded software rules? he says. How do you control it?

Autonomous Cars: When Musk and Koopman Get Their Kicks Are Putting Towards a Realistic, Humanoid Robot

The event name is a homage to a short story collection called “We, Robot” by Isaac Asimov. It’s also the title of a very vaguely related Will Smith action movie.

There’s a chance that the reveal could feature a humanoid robot developed byTesla, known as Optimus, which is capable of doing repetitive tasks.

An analyst and a long-time investor in the company will be at the event. He’s less interested in androids and more in whether Musk can demonstrate a fully autonomous vehicle that actually works.

During the event, Musk pitched the idea of autonomous cars as primarily a time-saver. “Think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car,” he said, “and the time they will get back that they can now spend on their books or watching a movie or doing work or whatever.”

But Musk has a track record of coming from behind to pull off impossible victories. The Model 3 production and the early success of the Cybertruck are two recent examples of Musk defying expectations.

Musk said that autonomous cars are expected to be 10-20 times safer than human-driven vehicles and could cost as low as $0.20 per mile, compared to the $1 per mile for city buses.

Phil Koopman, an AV expert from Carnegie Mellon, wrote in his newsletter that Prototype hardware that works in a limited demo is cool. “But it is not production, and hardware is not the limit to autonomous vehicles. The tent is made of a long pole.

What are we missing from Self-Driving Cars? A brief review after the Supersonic Event on Oct. 20, 2011 at the Fermilab Tevatron

The stock decline in the wake of the event was dismissed by analyst Dan Ives as a knee- jerk reaction that would eventually correct itself. He wrote on Friday that they did not agree with the notion that last night was a disappointment and that they saw huge improvements in the game.

Since then, interest rates have skyrocketed, the buckets of ample venture capital funding have dried up, and most of the major players working on this technology have since reconfigured their timelines to account for how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove they can be safer than humans. Even Waymo, which is far and away the leader in the space, is taking things real slowly, one city at a time. It can’t promise the world; the company is still trying to figure out highways.

Last night, he spoke of how the images of the parking lots were turned into gardens on the giant screens above him. (I call this “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”)

“We want to have a fun, exciting future,” he said, “that if you could look in a crystal ball and see that future, you’d be like, ‘Yes, I wish I could be there now.’”

It was nice to hear Mr. Dark MAGA give a brighter vision for the future, but after the event, it is difficult to make sense of how we will get there. There were no details regarding how he will overcome the obstacles in his path. Here is a quick list of the unresolved issues.

Source: The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that

What he asked of his ex-CEO Kyle: “Hey, I know, but what he couldn’t tell me”

This is just scratching the surface. Kyle was the ex-CEO of Cruise and he put up a list of his own questions for the company on X. A guy was pushed out of his own company due to a mistake he made when responding to a hard topredict edge case, in which a human driver hit a pedestrian and flew into one of Cruise’s robotaxis.

It seems unlikely that Musk will meet a similar fate as Vogt, despite fumbling the ball so badly. His company has aggressively pushed into technology that has resulted in a lot of death and destruction. He was successful in avoiding those consequences.

But he did none of those things. Instead, he put on a show that looked like a good show with fake movie posters, delicious food, and robot bartenders. And he fell back on the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous vehicle that was “just two years away.”

He could have provided an ounce of detail about the Cybercab’s technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. He could have shocked the industry and surprised his doubters by embracing the lidar system, a vital redundant system for every other self driving vehicle on Earth.

He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly-wing doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with impressive-looking margins.

He could have released the safety data for the Full Self-Driving feature that would have shown progress for the driver-assisted feature and wouldn’t make it look bad.

Tesla Cybercab: A Two-Dimensional Self-Driving Taxi That Musk Says Will Be Produced in Three Years

It’s critical that the event happens at a time of increased competition for electric vehicles from both legacy and upstart manufacturers in China, as well as increasing competition from other countries such as India. Last quarter, the company missed analyst expectations, and deliveries are down this year. The company laid off a number of employees working on electric vehicle production and batteries, as well as charging infrastructure. A number of top executives have left the company in the past few weeks.

Later in front of an audience of excited and enthusiasticTesla fans and shareholders, Musk referred to the setup as a set, far from the messy, busy streets where one day an autonomously driving vehicle might be challenged to drive.

Almost an hour after Tesla had said the debut event would begin, Musk was escorted by a man dressed as an astronaut to the butterfly doors of the silver prototype. He took a quick, seemingly driverless jaunt through the dark, ghostly streets of the Warner Bros. Studios in Southern California, before emerging from the car to take the stage.

Movie studios are where Hollywood spins fantastical worlds out of fancy camera angles and special effects. So where better to show off the Tesla Cybercab, a two-door self-driving taxi that CEO Elon Musk says will be in production in just three years—but that’s still fascinatingly short on firm detail?