In a grandiose event held on a giant movie set with fake city streets, Elon Musk has shown, for the first time, what Tesla's specialized driverless car will look like.
The robot taxi is a car designed specifically to be driverless, and has no provisions for steering wheel or pedals. It is also tailored for high utilization, presumably with hard wearing and easily cleanable interior.
Design of the robot taxi reminds of Tesla Cybertruck - headlights and taillights form a single horizontal "light saber" line, and some of the surfaces are flat and "edgy", reminding of the Cybertruck stainless steel construction, although I am almost certain this new car will not be made of stainless, due to its curvy roofline and, possibly, cost constraints.
While robot taxi is a 4 seater, it only has 2 doors. But doors are very large and open forwards as well as upwards, similar to some supercars. The wheel design is also spectacular - completely featureless aerodynamic "dishes" for all 4 wheels. Overall I do like this design from aesthetic point of view. It somehow reminds me of a compressed, fatter version of McLaren Speedtail, crossed with Tesla Cybertruck.
Soon after arriving at stage in one of the new robo-taxis roaming the "movie set" streets, another unexpected vehicle appeared - a 20 seater self driving van which Elon Musk called "Roboven". While still only in prototype stage, it does show approximately what Tesla minivan or small cargo van will look like - more like a miniature high speed train locomotive and less like anything with wheels - it does not even have windscreen.
Of course, it wouldn't be Tesla event if Musk didn't make any optimistic promises and unrealistic timelines. The new robo-taxi is planned for delivery in 2026 and full unsupervised self driving feature in Tesla Model 3 and Model Y in Texas and California will be enabled next year. Frankly, if I was Tesla investor, I would be more worried than happy about this announcement. When car is driving you, it should assume all liability for accidents. And such liability could end up in limitless losses. There are plenty of examples in US court rulings where companies are forced to pay absurd amounts for dubious, imaginary damages. Someone losing their life in self driving car accident would not be imaginary at all.
The biggest over-promise in this Adam Neumannian "We" event must be the projected price for the robot taxi - 30 thousand US dollars. That's $30k in 2026 money, not even in today's money which is already worthless when it comes to buying cars. Surely this is pipe dream, unless he plans to partially subsidize these cars with investor's money, with the hope to make that money back by gaining market share and gathering valuable telemetry and video data. The classic "bait and switch" model where initial goal is to expand at all costs, including rendering services or selling goods below cost, and later switch up prices when competitors (traditional taxi and ride sharing apps/companies) are out of business.
The final piece of Musk's presentation included update on Optimus humanoid robot. This time there were no dancers in robot suits, but real Optimus robots. Not just one or two but multiple. While they didn't demonstrate any intellect, they did look a lot better than before, with ability to, somewhat clumsily, walk and move their arms and hands in fluid human-like fashion. Elon Musk called Optimus "the biggest product of all time", assuming every person on earth will want a humanoid assistant.
Below I have added the video stream of "We, Robot" event. Presentation starts at 53 minute mark.
