Elon Musk Has Been Promising Robotaxis To Investors Since 2016

“When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination.”

“You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.”

“In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are.”

“This would be something that would be a significant offset on the cost of ownership of a car and then a revenue generator for Tesla as well. Obviously, the majority of the economics would go to the owner of the car. Sometimes, it’s been characterized as Tesla versus Uber or Lyft or something like that. It’s not Tesla versus Uber; it’s the people versus Uber.”

“A lot of people think that once you make cars autonomous that they’ll be able to go faster and that will alleviate congestion and to some degree that will be true. But once you have shared autonomy where it’s much cheaper to go by car. And you can go point to point. The affordability of going in a car will be better than that of a bus. Like, it would cost less than a bus ticket. So the amount of driving that will occur will be much greater with shared autonomy and actually, traffic will get far worse.”

“Great, thank you. Again - actually I’ve said this before, what I think - just talking a bit about the kind of long-term future, we absolutely see the future as kind of - as sort of a shared electric autonomy. So that you’ll be able to do ride-hailing or share your car anyway, sort of long-term model that’s some combination of like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. There will be Tesla dedicated cars for ride-hailing and there will be - and any customer will be able to share their car at will, just like you share your house in Airbnb. So it’s a combination of those two models. I think, it’s pretty obviously where things are headed long-term.”

“The advantage that Tesla will have is that we will have millions of cars in the field with full autonomy capability, and no one else will have that. So I think that puts us - that will end up putting us in the strongest competitive position long-term.”

“From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis on the road. The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update; that’s all it takes.”

“We’re also working on a new vehicle that I alluded to at the Giga Texas opening, which is a dedicated robotaxi. That’s highly optimized for autonomy, meaning it would not have steering wheel or pedals. And there are a number of other innovations around it that I think are quite exciting. That is fundamentally optimized for — trying to achieve the lowest fully considered cost per mile or cost per kilometer, accounting everything.”

“We don’t want to jump the gun on an exciting product announcement too much. So, I think, we’ll aim to — we do a product event for robotaxi next year and get into more detail, but we are aiming for volume production in 2024.”