On October 11th, the much-anticipated launch of Tesla’s “WE,ROBOT” new products was held as scheduled.
Yes, one of the highlights of Tesla’s conference is the launch of the long-awaited driverless taxi product Cybercab and driverless utility vehicle Robovan, as well as Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus.
At the same time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also announced the launch timeline of three major products on the spot.
However, more technical details about the product were not disclosed at this conference.
You know, the press conference was scheduled to officially start at 10:00 Beijing time on October 11th, but due to an emergency at the scene, the product released was still “futures”, and there was not the expected “affordable car” Model 2, so many people kept complaining after watching it.
The stock market reacted more directly to Tesla’s performance.
After Tesla Cybercab and Robovan made their world debut on the 10th, Tesla’s share price fell by 10% at the beginning of the day, the biggest drop since August 5.
, photo source: Oriental Fortune net screenshot, Cybercab+Robovan, the world’s first show of two new products, like the previous warm-up, the “highlight” of this event is undoubtedly Tesla Robotaxi.
According to initial expectations, Tesla was scheduled to release the “new species” on August 8, but Musk “required important changes to the design of the front of the vehicle”, so the launch was postponed to October to give the project team more time to build more prototype cars.
Photo: Tesla, like the opening of many new car launches, Musk entered the event directly in a cyber unmanned taxi, Cybercab.
According to Musk, there are nearly 50 Tesla driverless cars running at the event, including 20 Cybercab and some fully self-driving Model Y and Robovan.
In the design, Tesla Cybercab adopts a two-seat, two-door design with no steering wheel and pedals, and has the function of wireless induction charging.
At the same time, the mechanical arm can be used to automatically clean the interior environment of the car.
The hardware cost of the new car on the autopilot system is expected to be less than $30, 000 because it uses AI+ ‘s completely unsupervised autopilot FSD scheme with pure vision.
However, Musk also pointed out that the current operating cost of Cybercab is still high, about $1 per mile, and is expected to fall to about $0.
20 per mile in the future, while the efficiency of vehicles will also be improved.
According to Musk, there are now 168 hours a week, but the average use time of each car is only about 10 hours, most of which is parked in the parking lot.
“if the vehicle can drive itself, the utilization rate can be increased by 5 to 10 times,” Musk said, “and the safety of self-driving vehicles will be 10 times or more than that of human driving.
” Photo: Tesla, according to the plan, Tesla’s unsupervised version of FSD fully self-driving capability will be first launched in Texas and California by 2025, while continuing to follow up regulatory developments outside the United States.
It is expected that from 2026 to 2027, Tesla Cybercab will achieve mass production and be equipped with AI5 chips.
In addition, Tesla also plans to launch Cybercab 2, but Musk did not disclose information about Cybercab 2.
Musk plans to operate his own fleet of self-driving taxis on Tesla’s ride-hailing app in the future, and Tesla owners can also add their vehicles to Tesla’s ride-hailing app to earn extra income when the car is not in use, but Tesla will share 25% to 30% of that income.
Before that, users could experience Robotaxi with the unsupervised FSD fully self-driving Model S/3/X/Y and cyber off-road wagons.
It is reported that based on the “end-to-end” large model algorithm and powerful computing power, FSD’s fully autopilot capability will enable Tesla to drive anywhere on the earth without relying on high-precision maps in the future.
At present, all Model S/3/X/Y models have the hardware to upgrade to FSD fully autopilot.
According to statistics, by the second quarter of 2024, Tesla’s FSD fully self-driving ability had accumulated more than 1.
6 billion miles (about 2.
574 billion km).
With the continuous improvement of Tesla’s possession and mileage, this training data will accelerate.
Photo: Tesla, the second blockbuster product is the self-driving multi-purpose vehicle RoboVan.
According to Musk, in addition to commercial and private travel, the product can also be used as a school bus or to transport goods, and like Cybercab, RoboVan has removed the steering wheel and pedals.
When used as a self-driving bus, the RoboVan can carry 20 people, achieving higher travel efficiency and experience, while significantly reducing travel costs, which can be as low as 5-10 cents per mile.
However, Musk did not disclose the expected mass production schedule of the product, or more details of the product.
The third is Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus.
In the field of robots, Tesla also launched the layout a long time ago.
At present, many of the core technologies developed by Tesla for electric vehicles, including batteries, power electronic systems, advanced electric drive systems, software systems and artificial intelligence computers, are suitable for humanoid robots, which are equivalent to homologous technologies.
Photo source: Tesla, according to Musk’s vision, after the Tesla humanoid robot is rolled out on a large scale in the future, the cost can be reduced to about $20, 000 to $30, 000, which may be cheaper than a car.
These robots can not only be used to take care of children and walk dogs, but also to mow lawns, shop, help pour drinks and so on.
At the scene of this event, Tesla also demonstrated the related functions of the humanoid robot.
As a result, these humanoid robots can obviously communicate with humans in a noisy environment.
Tesla enters, will Robotaxi be all right? As the “pearl” in the crown of self-driving, Robotaxi was once a must for the global tech giants.
However, in the past two years, due to the late arrival of high-level self-driving commercialization, the deterioration of the external market environment and strict regulation, the L4, represented by Robotaxi, has fallen into a sustained downturn.
Since 2020, autopilot companies, including Uber, Argo AI, Motional and so on, have made adjustments to their autopilot businesses, or sold them as a whole, or laid off or shut down their staff in order toStop the loss in time.
In China, L4 companies, represented by Wenyuan Zhixing, pony Zhixing, and Light Boat Zhihang, have announced that they have reduced the dimension of All in L4 to the mass production level L2hand L2 + market, thus forming a certain “blood recovery” ability.
Will the high-profile entry of Tesla re-arouse the market’s confidence in L4? At present, with the rapid iteration of AI technology, the relevant industry chain is becoming more and more mature, at the same time, the policy level continues to provide benefits for high-level autopilot landing, Robotaxi track has shown signs of warming up.
Photo: Galaxy, a few days ago, it has been reported that Baidu self-driving taxi service radish fast run is going out to sea and will release Apollo self-driving open platform with Baidu’s latest self-driving model ADFM.
It is reported that Baidu has carried out in-depth communication with a number of international companies and plans to enter overseas markets, among which Hong Kong is expected to become the first landing market for radish fast running outside the mainland.
At present, Baidu has arranged autopilot travel services in many cities in China.
According to Baidu’s second-quarter results, in the second quarter of 2024, Baidu’s self-driving service turnip Express supplied about 899000 self-driving orders, an increase of 26 percent over the same period last year.
Radish Express has cumulatively provided more than 7 million orders for self-driving travel services to the public.
Next, if Baidu radish goes out to sea smoothly, it will undoubtedly better promote the technology upgrade and landing application of Baidu unmanned car.
On the other hand, going out to sea can certainly provide more room for development for local enterprises, and with the increasingly stringent regulation of overseas markets, the challenges faced by domestic smart driving technology companies should not be ignored.
The relevant person in charge of Yuanrong Kai Bank pointed out that although some Chinese self-driving companies have carried out demonstration operations on limited road sections in some countries, they have not been promoted on a large scale.
And as different countries and regions have different certification standards and regulatory systems for self-driving cars, companies also need to spend a lot of time and cost to understand local standards.
Especially in the North American market, it has been even more difficult for Chinese self-driving companies to go to sea since the Biden government proposed banning the use of Chinese software and hardware in connected and self-driving cars.
In overseas markets, the head players represented by Waymo, Cruise, Uber, etc.
, although there have been many twists and turns on the road of Robotaxi research and development in the past few years, they have also continued to deepen the application of Robotaxi layout, and have turned from playing alone in the past to joining forces.
Photo: Waymo, Oct.
4, Waymo issued a statement saying that the company will add Hyundai’s electric models to its fleet of driverless taxis.
Before that, Hyundai Motors and Amber had jointly set up a joint venture company Motional to promote Robotaxi research and development.
But Amber confirmed the sale of its stake in Motional in May because of continuing losses.
In the same month, Motional announced that it would suspend the deployment of self-driving taxis with ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft and lay off staff and restructuring.
In mid-September Uber announced that it would expand its partnership with Waymo with plans to launch ride-hailing services in Austin Texas and Atlanta Georgia early next year.
In addition, Uber has successively reached deep cooperation with Wenyuan Zhixing, General Cruise, BYD and other enterprises to jointly promote the large-scale application of autopilot.
Compared with many other industries, autopilot is a typical long slope thick snow track, which not only has a large investment, but also has a slow realization and a long return cycle.
In the past few years, the separate battles of whole car factories, technology companies and self-driving startups have contributed to the prosperity of the self-driving industry to some extent, but also caused a huge waste of resources.
Now head companies are rallying together, which is expected to speed up the landing of autopilot on a large scale through the coordination of resources.
According to Zhou Guang, CEO of Yuanrong Qixing, the biggest challenge for self-driving cars to scale is still the technical level, and to achieve technical iteration, it is necessary to obtain a massive desensitization high-quality data training model.
In this process, because the intelligent driving enterprises represented by Yuanrong Qixing can cooperate with a number of car companies, once the intelligent driving system is rapidly rolled out in the consumer market, the amount of data obtained will be greatly increased, and the technology gap with Tesla will gradually narrow.
Nevertheless, we believe that Tesla will assume the role of catfish in the industry, activate competition in the industry, and promote consumers to accept and get used to using intelligent driving systems.
” Zhou Guang pointed out.
It is worth mentioning that Musk proposed large-scale mass production of Cybercab in 2026, which is basically consistent with the pace or forecast of many enterprises.
Source: he Xiaopeng Weibo, October 10, Xiaopeng Automobile Chairman and CEO he Xiaopeng said in an article in response to the progress of Robotaxi business that Xiaopeng Robotaxi business is being accelerated, and the software experience of overseas first-class Robotaxi will be realized in the second half of next year, and Robotaxi is planned to be officially launched in 2026.
With the gradual maturity of L4 smart driving capabilities and the continuous improvement of policies and regulations, the Robotaxi cockpit can be designed into any scene, and the future may not be a click to order coffee, but a click to call a coffee shop to serve you.
” He Xiaopeng pointed out.
In addition, Guangzhou Automobile and Volkswagen also plan to launch L4 products or related services around 2026, such as Qi Travel, T3 Travel and other self-driving travel companies, and even think that 2026 and 2027 will be the inflection point for Robotaxi to enter commercial operation.
Next, let’s see who will be the first to qualify under the autopilot.
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