Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the automaker is planning to unveil its new ‘robotaxi’, a next-generation self-driving vehicle, on August eighth.
After the Cybertruck, Tesla has been expected to release two highly anticipated new electric vehicles: a smaller and cheaper electric automobile, commonly known as the “$25,000 Tesla Model 2”; and a new “dedicated robotaxi,” a vehicle designed from the bottom up for autonomous driving with none pedals or steering wheel.
When it involves the robotaxi, Tesla has been talking about making all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 being able to becoming robotaxis through a software update, but at Tesla’s Cyber Rodeo event in April 2022, Musk announced that Tesla would also construct a new vehicle specifically to be a “robotaxi.”
Today, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would unveil the Robotaxi on August eighth:
Interestingly, the announcement comes after a report that Tesla had scrapped its “Model 2” in favor of the Robotaxi.
Musk denied the report, but this announcement appears to be an acceleration of the robotaxi program as Tesla previously talked about an unveiling of the next-gen vehicles at the top of 2024.
Through Walter Issacson’s approved biography of Musk, we learned that Tesla Robotaxi will be “Cybertruck-like”.
The book also released an image of an early design prototype of the vehicle – pictured above.
Electrek’s Take
As I understand it, the concept of a “Tesla Robotaxi” is to design a vehicle optimized for the bottom up for driverless ridesharing.
It’s an interesting idea, however it is making some Tesla owners nervous since it could open the door to Tesla focusing on achieving self-driving on this new hardware quite than on its existing vehicle fleet as promised and as sold to customers for years.
Credit : electrek.co
