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Tesla company has unveiled its long-awaited robotaxi at a Hollywood studio Thursday night, though fans of the electric vehicle maker will have to wait until at least 2026 before they are available.
CEO Elon Musk pulled up to a stage at the Warner Bros. studio lot in one of the company’s “Cybercabs,” telling the crowd that the sleek, AI-powered vehicles don’t have steering wheels or pedals. He also expressed confidence in the progress the company has made on autonomous driving technology that makes it possible for vehicles to drive without human intervention.
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Tesla began selling the software, which is called “Full Self-Driving,” nine years ago. But there are doubts about its reliability.
“We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving. where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” he said. “It’s going to be a glorious future.”
Tesla expects the Cybercabs to cost under $30,000, Musk said. He estimated that the vehicles would become available in 2026, then added “before 2027.”
The company also expects to make the Full Self-Driving technology available on its popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in Texas and California next year.
Mr Musk also said he expected to see “fully autonomous unsupervised” technology available in Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y in Texas and California next year “with permission where ever regulators approve it.”
But that approval is far from guaranteed.
“It is a big chunk of metal driving on roads at high speeds, so safety concerns are big,” said Samitha Samaranayake, an associate professor in engineering at Cornell University.
Tesla’s self-driving ambitions rely on cameras that are cheaper than radar and Lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors that are the technology backbone of many competitors’ vehicles.
By teaching its cars to drive, Tesla plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) trained by the raw data it collects from its millions of vehicles.
But the research community “is not sold on whether the Tesla style of doing things can give the safety guarantees that we would like,” Mr Samaranayake said.
