Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have taken the stage at last night’s “We, Robot” event and put a lot of fears to rest.
He could have released comprehensive safety data for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature that showed real progress for the driver-assist feature, contradicting all the crowdsourced data that’s out there making FSD look truly awful.
He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly-wing doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with impressive-looking margins.
He could have provided an ounce of detail about the Cybercab’s technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. And he could have shocked the industry and surprised many of his doubters by embracing lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for every other driverless vehicle on Earth.
But he did none of those things. Instead, he put on what arguably looked like a great show, complete with fake movie posters, a ton of delicious-looking food, and robot bartenders. And he fell back on the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous vehicle that was “just two years away.”
We’ve been down this road before. Many times.
“Prototype hardware that works in a limited demo is cool, interesting, and fine to comment on,” Phil Koopman, an AV expert from Carnegie Mellon, wrote in his newsletter this morning. “But it is not production, and hardware is not the limit to autonomous vehicles. Software is the long pole in the tent.”
At first glance, it would seem as if the event did the trick. There were plenty of Tesla fans who were thoroughly impressed by what they saw last night and ready to declare that it was “game over” for every other player in the field. The Robovan wowed many with its Art Deco styling. And positive vibes extended to the company’s most bullish investors, some of whom participated in Musk’s theme park experience and came away forever altered.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who was in attendance, dismissed any stock decline in the aftermath of the event — Tesla was trading down by nearly 9 points in early trading Friday — as a “knee-jerk reaction” that would eventually correct itself. “We strongly disagree with the notion that last night was a disappointment,” he wrote Friday, “as we would argue the opposite seeing Cybercab with our own eyes and the massive improvements in Optimus which we interacted with throughout the evening.”
It appears to be lost on some people how much things have changed since 2016, when Musk first promised that Full Self-Driving was a mere “two years away.” Many seem to be stuck in that outdated mindset that autonomous driving was an easy problem to solve and that fully driverless cars were on the cusp of taking over the world.
Since then, interest rates have skyrocketed, the buckets of ample venture capital funding have dried up, and most of the major players working on this technology have since reconfigured their timelines to account for how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove they can be safer than humans. Even Waymo, which is far and away the leader in the space, is taking things real slowly, one city at a time. It can’t promise the world; the company is still trying to figure out highways.
Musk is promising the opposite. He said that Tesla plans to launch fully autonomous driving in Texas and California next year, with the Cybercab entering production by 2026. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving would come first. But he promised that people could even buy the Cybercab for a price “less than $30,000.” Potential owners would be like shepherds, tending their flock of little driverless cabs, roaming the streetscape.
Last night, his pitch veered utopian, as images of parking lots transformed into verdant gardens displayed on the giant screens above him. (I call this “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”)
“We want to have a fun, exciting future,” he said, “that if you could look in a crystal ball and see that future, you’d be like, ‘Yes, I wish I could be there now.’”
It was kind of nice to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” articulate a brighter vision for the future, but after the event, it’s even less clear how we’ll get there. We got no details about how he will overcome the enormous obstacles in his path. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the issues that went unresolved: