How Elon Musk Is Reinventing Tesla's Robotaxi Strategy
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The future of Tesla is going to be interesting. Elon Musk plans to change Tesla's future by pushing it toward artificial intelligence and robotics. And that raises a question: Can Tesla really transform from a car company, a great car company, into a leader in autonomous systems? Tesla started 22 years ago.

with a simple plan that didn't depend on breakthroughs in battery technology. The founders believed they could create EVs by combining proven components in new ways. They relied on lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in laptops, and built battery packs from thousands of small cells.

This approach allowed Tesla to succeed where traditional automakers had failed with heavy and inefficient lead-acid batteries. Elon Musk now wants to take Tesla in a different path.

He no longer focuses primarily on making EVs driven by people. Instead, he wants Tesla to become a robotics company that builds driverless cars and humanoid robots. He believes this move will help Tesla stay valued like a technology company rather than an automaker.

Musk expects to launch public robotaxi services very soon on June 22nd with a small fleet in Austin, Texas. They set this possible launch date of the 22nd, but Musk recently warned that they may delay this timeline if safety concerns arise. And Tesla's early success came from using software and engineering to make lithium-ion battery packs safe and reliable.

gave the company a strong lead before competitors recognized the potential of these batteries. Now, Musk hopes Tesla can use its manufacturing expertise to integrate artificial intelligence more so into the vehicles. And unlike the company's earlier strategy of using existing parts creatively, Tesla has spent years building its own AI systems for self-driving tech.

Tesla's FSD system and autopilot features show how far the company has come. However, Tesla admits that these systems are not fully, truly autonomous and drivers remain legally responsible for their vehicles.

Elon Musk argues that Tesla holds an advantage over competitors because its fleet provides valuable real-world data. The data helps the company improve its AI systems faster than rivals. Companies like Waymo and GM have also worked on driverless technology, but their efforts are limited. GM stopped its robo-taxi plans because of high costs, and Waymo operates a modest fleet of around 1,500 to 2,000 vehicles.

A number similar to GM's failed EV1 program from over 25 years ago, which helped inspire Tesla's creation in the first place. And now Tesla's robust taxis project depends heavily on turning its production values into autonomous taxis. Musk claims that every Tesla rolling off the line today is capable of unsupervised self-driving.

He shared footage of a Tesla Model Y driving without anyone in the front seat during tests in Austin. Now, despite these demonstrations, Musk remains cautious. He said Tesla's initial launch will be small, possibly with about 10 robo taxis operating in the first week. He expects to scale this up to thousands of vehicles within months and aims to have hundreds of thousands or even a million on the road by the end of 2026.

Now, Musk's public statements about Tesla's safety priorities reflect the difficulties of delivering autonomous vehicles at scale. He said the company is super paranoid about safety, which means that the robo-taxi launch could face further delays. And Tesla's competitors, including Waymo and Zoox, have already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers behind the wheel, with tens of thousands of rides for Waymo. And in some cases,

surveys, people prefer an autonomous Waymo to an Uber where some person is driving. Now, Zoox and Waymo have already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers behind the wheel.

But their technology remains complex and far from widespread. Even Waymo's limited fleet has not come close to the commercial success of Google's core business. But Tesla's shift toward AI marks a major change from its founding principles. The company originally succeeded by rethinking how to combine the existing technologies. But now they're creating their own technologies. They're creating their own AI. And they're

relying on large-scale deployment of self-driving cars, but now we haven't seen Tesla make self-driving into a major part of its business. Elon Musk's confidence in Tesla's AI technology rests on the company's production scale and data advantage, but challenges in safety regulation and public acceptance remain.

Now, the future of Tesla now depends on whether Musk's AI vision can deliver real results. Remember a few years ago when Zuckerberg was talking about the metaverse? And then where is the metaverse? We were never in the metaverse. All the 3D headsets, all the virtual reality, that was...

top of the line for a few years and now it's bottom of the barrel nobody really uses it in a real world application other than engineers and you know kind of niche things it's a fun thing to play around with but zuckerberg was talking about how everybody was going to have a headset we're all going to live and work in the metaverse and apple made a headset and elon musk doesn't want to be that

He knows that his AI vision can deliver real results. That's what he believes. The company's focus has moved from making EVs accessible to building a network of driverless cars. All of their manufacturers have some sort of EV in the pipeline if they don't already have some on the road. And this took them a decade or two to figure this out. So if Elon keeps making these moves with Tesla and moving forward with Tesla, they're also going to be

20 years behind by the time all of this happens. So somebody like Ford or GM, who is barely making EVs at this point, they don't have an AI division. They don't have anything to compete with Musk right now. He has XAI. He has X.com or X, if you want to call it that. And both of them have an AI component. And now all of that is being rolled into Tesla. Tesla has the data from all of the driving from other people.

They have some sensors. They don't have LiDAR, which Waymo has. And in tests, as we've seen, if you look around on YouTube, you'll find Tesla versus LiDAR. Just look that up and you can see for yourself how Tesla has failed against LiDAR in numerous circumstances. And there are videos of Teslas just running through Tesla.

dummies and mannequins on the side of school buses, things like that. And it's, you know, part of it is that some of the sensors in Tesla don't match up to the way that Waymo sensors work. And that's what Elon Musk is talking about when he's talking about Tesla being cautious. He wants them to be extremely cautious because if anything happens right away with these Austin tests, that's why they're starting small.

He's saying something like a dozen cars on the road, robo-taxis in the first week, which is a totally fine test set. But he wants to upgrade this to thousands of vehicles within months. So you don't just start off with 10 operational robo-taxis in a week, and then within months you get to thousands of vehicles. Usually it would go from like 10 robo-taxis in Austin to...

20, 30, 40 within months. Plus there's also regulatory hurdles. So if you're good in Austin, it doesn't mean you're going to be good in Arkansas, so to speak, or you're not going to get robo taxis in New York city, thousands of robo taxes in New York city or San Francisco or LA or,

small cities like Buffalo or someplace like Orlando. You're not going to get robo taxis there because there are different regulatory hurdles per state and also per city. So if he wants to have thousands of robo taxis in Austin, that seems like it would be less of a hurdle than trying to go to these different states and different cities. So he also wants to have hundreds of thousands or even a million by the end of next year, a million vehicles.

On the road. Now, if he's talking about robo-taxi capable vehicles, where a current vehicle could be set up with software to become a robo-taxi and the owner of that vehicle, which he's stated in the past, he's stated this for years, that everybody that owns a Tesla, when you're not driving it, you can loan it out and you can make it into a robo-taxi and you can make money while it just sits there.

He said it's going to free up so many Teslas to do other things instead of sitting in a driveway or sitting in a parking lot and wasting away. Instead, it could be on the road doing work for you, making you money autonomously. But that also is full of regulatory hurdles. So hundreds of thousands of vehicles or even a million by the end of next year, sure, they might be capable, but will the regulatory issues

uh statutes allow them to drive on the roads um that's to be seen and we don't know what's going on behind the scenes with tesla and um in the cities and states and towns uh throughout the country so it could take maybe not months to do this it could possibly take them years waymo is only in a few cities right now i think they're in five cities and it took them years to get there

And they have proven technology. SpaceX or not SpaceX. Tesla has proven data from drivers, but they don't have proven robo taxi rides yet. So the fact that that hasn't happened yet and the fact that Elon is saying hundreds of thousands, possibly a million vehicles on the road being robo taxis. I don't think that's going to happen in one year.

Look, call me skeptic. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. But Elon Musk has promised things in the past that haven't happened at the scale that he wants them to happen. Like when he was officially and originally starting the Starship program, he was saying somewhere around the 2024, 2026-ish, 2028-ish.

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There's a possibility, but he doesn't have to worry about the hurdles from the government. The red tape from every city, every town, every municipality, every highway department, every state that he wants to get these robo taxis in. The scale that he wants is unfathomable. Can he do it? Yeah, maybe he can have a couple hundred taxis.

But hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road, that seems like a huge stretch. If you're on a podcast platform that has comments, let me know in the comments what you think about this. I think it's a great idea to have a million vehicles that you can just hop into. I wouldn't need a car anymore. I could just call a Tesla and have it pick me up and take me wherever I want to go. Drive around for a little while. That'd be great. Maybe I go to the beach. Maybe I go downtown. You know, same thing with the Uber. Yeah.

Also, if you're interested in driving for Uber, you can make a good amount of money driving for Uber. If you have a vehicle and you also just need some spare cash. Like if you want some spare money to go out to dinner, just drive Uber on the weekends. Make a couple hundred bucks. Make 50 bucks. Whatever. Drive for a couple hours on the weekends. Make a little side scratch. There's a link in the description or the show notes there.

And that'll get you into the program and you get a little kickback. I get a little bit of money for that too. Not a lot, but it does help out the show. So if you can sign up, if you're thinking about it, I've done it in the past and I'll tell you what, man, it's fun. Get to be some really interesting people. And all you're doing is driving. It's like, if you're, if you just want something to do to pass some time and you don't, don't really want to think it's

Driving Uber is definitely the way to go. It's really fun. So Elon is right on the precipice of doing something amazing if this all works out. And his public statements about Tesla's safety priorities show that there's difficulties delivering autonomous vehicles to scale.

He's been saying that he's super paranoid about safety, which means that the robo-taxi launch could face further delays. Because when they do these 10 test vehicles, they're going to gather some real-world data. And it's going to be in a small part of Austin, too. It's not going to be over the whole city. It's not going to be on the highways. It's going to be on a loop of streets that they know that they have the data for already. So they're going to be gathering data from these robo-taxis.

And they're going to have to scale this to a point where it's unheard of to scale this fast. Can they scale this fast? There's a possibility, but there's always... He has to work with the towns and the cities, and that's the part that's going to hold him back. You know, Zoox, Waymo, they've already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers behind the wheel, but their technology is very complex. Waymo's limited fleet is... You know, they're making money, but they're also...

They're also not producing the types of rides that will make the, sorry, the scale of rides that will make them billions of dollars, which they need to do in order to keep this program going. But the thing is Google owns Waymo. Google does this. So Google has it as a sort of like a side project. They want to make this work. But the other thing is they're going to make sure that they use this data from these rides and,

to license this technology to other car manufacturers in the future. So LIDAR, the radars, things like that, the data that they gather from this, they're not going to keep to themselves. They're going to

Use it with manufacturers, GM, Ford, et cetera, and Audi. I've heard plans of maybe Porsche's influence there with Waymo and their technologies. And we'll see what happens, though.

Because Tesla is just going to keep it in Tesla. They're going to keep all the money themselves. They're not going to license anything, as far as we know. Elon said he's open to it, but he needs to have the lead first. He has to have a crazy lead before he actually licenses anything to anybody else. But, you know, future of Tesla really does depend on the AI vision that Musk is portraying with these driverless cars. Companies focus has moved from building electric vehicles to

which is amazing. And, you know, one of the biggest breakthroughs in technology in the last 20 years. But now they're going to be building a network of driverless cars. The success or the failure of the strategy will shape technology.

future, but also it'll shape robotics. It'll shape other companies that build parts for robotics. It'll shape industries as a whole and also shape cities of the future, which will become manufacturing hubs like Austin is for robotics and AI. Now they're proving the artificial intelligence can move beyond just the lab, beyond the

Hackers making AI a more viable product for everybody beyond the lab tests and make it into everyday life at a scale that no one else has ever achieved. Henry Ford built the automobile into a massive business. Elon Musk has built EVs into a massive business, and he's planning on building driverless cars into an even bigger business.

And I, for one, I'm really excited about the future of driverless vehicles.

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