Big things appear to be happening in the world of self-driving cars. While there are really no truly autonomous vehicles in the world, Tesla may be inching closer to making this dream a reality if comments from Elon Musk are to be believed. The billionaire CEO made some intriguing announcements during the automaker’s Q4 2024 earnings webcast on January 29.
Related
Tesla ‘We, Robot’ Robotaxi Event
The RoboTaxi, aka ‘CyberCab’ arrives without any steering, pedals, along with the ‘Robovan’ and the Optimus humanoids.
Robotaxis Are Coming To Austin, Texas This June
While speaking during this presentation, Musk said, “We’re going to be launching unsupervised Full Self-Driving as a paid service in Austin (Texas) in June.” He later mentioned that after talking with the development team they’re confident enough to do an initial launch of this technology, completely unsupervised, meaning no one is in the vehicle to control it if something goes wrong.
It will be intriguing to see if this is technologically feasible, and if so, whether Tesla can hit the promised June deadline. Musk has a penchant for promising the world and then failing to deliver. The new Tesla Roadster hasn’t materialized seven years after being announced, the $35,000 Model 3 was a gross distortion, and the tech mogul’s other companies have missed various milestones or outright failed to deliver what was pledged.
Musk Says The Proof Is In The Pudding
Supporting his argument, though, Musk explained, “We already have Teslas operating autonomously, unsupervised Full Self-Driving at our factory in Fremont (California). And we’ll soon be doing that at our factory in Texas.” Continuing, he added, “So, thousands of cars everyday are driving with no one in them … they will soon be doing that in Austin and then elsewhere in the world at the rest of our factories, which is pretty cool.”
Musk seems confident in Tesla’s ability to operate a fleet of autonomous robotaxis on public roads. He said, “So, what I’m saying is, this is not some far-off, mythical situation, it’s literally [a] … five, six months-away type of thing.”
Of course, safety is a top priority, both for passengers and the public alike, something Musk acknowledged during his presentation. This is why he said they’re dipping their toes in the water by limiting this project to Austin. After that, Tesla plans to slowly expand beyond that.
“Our solution is a generalized AI solution,” Musk explained, “it does not require high-precision maps of a locality,” which means these completely self-driving taxis could be able to operate just about anywhere, not just the capital city of Texas. Despite this apparent versatility, Tesla is only focusing on Austin for the time being.
Self-driving cars have been a dream for probably the last century, and maybe this development by Tesla will finally start to make them a reality. Hopefully, the automaker can deliver on this seemingly ambitious promise.
