Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have taken the stage at last night's “We Robot” event and calmed many fears.
It could have released full safety data for the company's full self-driving feature that showed real progress for the driver assistance feature, contradicting all the claims. crowdsourced data that's out there making FSD look really horrible.
It could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly doors, would be a fleet-owned, Level 4, geofenced vehicle operating in a select few markets with impressive-looking margins.
It could have provided minimal details about the Cybercab's technology, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. And it could have shocked the industry and surprised many of its skeptics by adopting lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for all other self-driving vehicles on Earth.
But he didn't do any of those things. Instead, he put on what arguably looked like a big show, complete with fake movie posters, lots of delicious-looking food, and robot waiters. And he resorted to the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous vehicle that was “just two years away.”
We have been down this road before. Many times.
“Prototype hardware working in a limited demo is cool, interesting and okay to talk about,” said Phil Koopman, an AV expert at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote in his newsletter this morning. “But it's not about production and hardware is not the limit for autonomous vehicles. “The software is the long pole of the store.”
At first glance, it would seem that the event worked. There were many Tesla fans who were completely blown away by what they saw last night and ready to declare that it was game over for all the other players on the field. The Robovan captivated many with its Art Deco style. And the positive vibes spread to the company's most optimistic investors, some of whom participated in Musk's theme park experience and came away forever altered.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who was present, dismissed any stock decline after the event (Tesla was trading down nearly 9 points in early trading Friday) as a “knee-jerk reaction” that would eventually correct itself. . “We strongly disagree with the idea that last night was a disappointment,” he wrote on Friday, “as we would say otherwise seeing Cybercab with our own eyes and the huge improvements to Optimus we interacted with throughout the night.”
Some people don't seem to understand how much things have changed since 2016, when Musk first promised that full autonomous driving was just “two years away.” Many seem to be stuck in that outdated mindset that autonomous driving was an easy problem to solve and that fully autonomous cars were about to take over the world.
Since then, interest rates have skyrocketed, venture capital funds have dried up, and most of the major players working on this technology have reconfigured their timelines to take into account how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove themselves. that are effective. may be safer than humans. Even Waymo, which is by far the leader in the space, is taking things very slow, one city at a time. He cannot promise the world; the company is still trying to figure out roads.
Musk promises the opposite. He said Tesla plans to launch fully autonomous driving in Texas and California next year, and the Cybercab will go into production in 2026. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with “unattended” fully autonomous driving would come first. But he promised that people could even buy the Cybercab for a price “less than $30,000.” The potential owners would be like shepherds, tending their flock of small driverless taxis, roaming the urban landscape.
Last night, his speech turned utopian, when images of parking lots transformed into green gardens were shown 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 into a crystal ball and see that future, you'd say, 'Yeah, I wish I could be there now.'”
It was nice to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” articulate a brighter vision for the future, but after the event, it's even less clear how we'll get there. We have no details on how he will overcome the enormous obstacles in his path. Here's a quick summary of some of the issues that were left unresolved:
- Regulatory approval. Tesla will need to obtain a permit from the California DMV to operate fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. And to achieve this, it will need to demonstrate that its vehicles can operate safely, something the company has not done so far. And producing a completely steering-wheelless Cybercab will require waivers from the federal government. This is a process that takes several months and success is far from guaranteed.
- Responsibility. What happens when a self-driving Tesla crashes? Who assumes legal responsibility? Until now, Tesla has actively avoided accepting responsibility for its driver-assistance accidents. And Musk has said he would continue to evade responsibility unless there was something “endemic to the design” of the vehicle.
- Remote assistance. What happens when a self-driving Tesla gets stuck somewhere? Or are you disabled? Other AV operators, such as Waymo and Cruise, have procedures for remote operators to attempt to move the vehicle off the road. And if all else fails, they send out teams of technicians who come out and manually drive the vehicle. How do you do that with a vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals?
- Fleet maintenance. Tesla briefly showed an image of a snake-shaped robot vacuum cleaner cleaning up some crumbs from the back seat of the Cybercab. But fleet maintenance is much more complicated. Who is going to clean the cameras during the winter or charge the vehicle when the battery is running low?
- Emergency detection. Other robotaxi companies have had difficulty reacting to emergency vehicles, unexpected detours and other extreme cases that could arise. Tesla was investigated by the federal government for more than a dozen incidents in which its vehicles using Autopilot collided with stopped emergency vehicles.
This is just scratching the surface.
This is just a sample of what happens. Kyle Vogt, former CEO of Cruise, x.com/kvogt/status/1844469409471176943″>published in x a pretty comprehensive list of his own questions for Tesla, most of which were left completely unanswered. And this is coming from a guy who was fired from his own company for botching the response to one of those hard-to-predict edge cases (a human driver hit a pedestrian, sending her flying into the path of one of Cruise's robotaxis). .
It seems unlikely that Musk will suffer a similar fate to Vogt, despite having dropped the ball so much. We've already seen the kinds of death and destruction that have resulted from your company's aggressive push toward autonomous technology. And so far, he has managed to avoid those consequences.
But once the driver is gone, along with the steering wheel and other controls, there will be no one left to blame except the guy who sold it.
