Shortly after Elon Musk accused Reuters of “lying” by claiming that Tesla was abandoning its plans to develop a low-cost $25,000 electric car and instead focus all efforts on a robotaxi, the Tesla CEO announced that he said Robotaxi would be unveiled at an event on August 8th.
This announcement comes at a time when Tesla electric car sales have fallen and profits have fallen, prompting the company and its CEO to look for another product to boost sales – or at least the stock price improve.
A Reuters report, citing three anonymous sources and internal documents, said Tesla is abandoning its plan to build a low-cost electric car and instead devoting resources to a planned robotaxi built on the same small EV platform that would power the low-cost vehicle.
Musk used his own social media platform to claim that Reuters was “lying,” although without disputing specific details. Hours later, he announced there that a “Tesla Robotaxi” would be unveiled on August 8th. And this despite the fact that Tesla already does for years regularly announces the “robot taxi”.
There have been reports about these two Tesla vehicles for years. However, Musk has wavered on whether to prioritize a typical car or one without a steering wheel or pedals, although a fully autonomous car has not yet been produced, as described in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk.
In mid-2022, Musk resisted his engineers’ urging to develop a car with a steering wheel and pedals. While it still moved forward, lead designer Franz von Holzhausen and engineering vice president Lars Moravy maintained the version of the traditional car as a “shadow project.”
Musk has been promising autonomous capabilities in Tesla vehicles for years. In 2016 he predicted that a Tesla would be self-sufficient by the end of 2017 Coast to coast would drive (which didn’t happen). In 2019, he promised to launch the company’s first robotaxis as part of a broader vision for an autonomous ride-sharing network by 2020 (which also failed to happen). A few years later, he predicted that a dedicated robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals would hit the market by 2024.
Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver assistance system called Autopilot. For an additional fee of $12,000, owners can get “full autonomous driving” or FSD acquire – a function that CEO Elon Musk has been promising for years and that should one day enable fully autonomous driving. However, Tesla vehicles are not autonomous. FSD instead includes a range of automated driving functions that require the driver to be ready to take control at any time, including the Summon parking function as well as Navigate on Autopilot, an active guidance system that guides a car from a highway on-ramp to an exit, including intersections and changing lanes. The system will also take over steering on city streets.