Tesla’s RoboTaxi claims are a true fantasy
Drivers, fleet managers, safety supervisors, fuel suppliers can all retire now
We’ll be able to “turn parking lots into parks” once Tesla’s RoboTaxi gets rolling in 2027, Elon Musk announced October 10th at Warner Studios in Los Angeles.
Wow. Parking lots into parks? Who doesn’t love THAT idea?
Yep, in the near future transportation will be so easy and pleasant, travellers will just relax in the lounge-like atmosphere of the CyberCab and think about anything BUT driving and parking. The robo-vehicle will do all the work: you could “fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk enthused.
Musk’s opening remarks are available to view on YouTube, and I highly recommend transportation professionals watch the whole video to witness the entire, fulsome scope of the sales pitch.
Personally, I have to admit that I remain skeptical about the whole autonomous vehicle concept. For over a decade, I’ve been attending product launches and reading press releases (which often become verbatim media articles) about autonomous. I now believe almost every autonomous thing I see, read, or ride is just razzle-dazzle bullshit designed to persuade investors to part with cash.
(See Road Warrior News’ coverage of the launch of Ollie, the Autonomous Shuttle and view the accompanying videos for just one example of a typical launch event and then ensuing disaster).
Perplexingly, at the Tesla CyberCab launch Musk compared automobile transportation with elevators:
“We think of times past, where there were there used to be an elevator operator in every elevator, but once in a while they got tired and accidentally sheer somebody in half. So now we have automated elevators: you just get an elevator and you press a button, and you don’t think about it, and it just takes you to the floor. And if you did see an elevator operator with a big relay switch, you’d be like, ‘That’s weird!’ Now, that’s how cars will be.”
Well, OK, but elevators only travel in one dimension – vertically – and stop in pre-determined places along the permanent shaft. One elevator is at very little risk of crashing into any other elevator in the building, no matter how snowy or icy the weather gets. Probably there’s a better analogy to use than comparing cars to elevators, but Musk was speaking off the cuff and maybe he didn’t have time to use an Artificial Intelligence language generator to write something better.
“It’s not just the lives and injuries saved,” Musk noted. “You can think of the car in an autonomous world as being like just a little lounge. You’re just sitting in a comfortable little lounge, and you can do whatever you want while you’re in this comfortable little lounge, and when you get out, you will be at your destination. So yeah, it’s gonna be awesome.”
In addition to allowing cities to turn parking lots into parks, and allowing drivers to relax in a comfortable lounge while not driving, the not-yet existent CyberCab RoboTaxi is going to be cheaper than a bus for public transit.
“We I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a bus per mile for a city is about $1 a mile, whereas the cost of CyberCab, we think probably over time the operating cost is probably going to be around 20 cents a mile, and the price, including taxes and everything else, probably ends up being 30 or 40 cents a mile.”
Wow. Better, safer AND cheaper. What is not to like? If you wonder if this is too good to be true, you are not alone. Most of the financial and business media dumped all over Tesla’s RoboTaxi event as being disappointing and short on details. To me, it represented the apogee of all the autonomous events we’ve seen in recent years; the epitome of fast-talking hucksterism.
According to Yahoo Finance, Tesla’s stock price plummeted on October 11th. It looks like some buyers know enough to beware, and professional human drivers will be needed for at least a few more years.
“I now believe almost every autonomous thing I see, read, or ride is just razzle-dazzle bullshit designed to persuade investors to part with cash.”
